Travicity
02-02-2011, 10:45 PM
Foiled Again: The Most Pathetic Movie Villains
A hero needs a villain, or so the poets say, but the 25 jamokes on this list probably should have thought twice. Lame plans, goofy outfits, bad hairstyles - these inept antagonists have it all.
25
Profion
There are a lot of problems with 2000's Dungeons & Dragons, like expecting Marlon Wayans to sell the movie as one of your leads. But perhaps the biggest is the insane scenery-chewing of Mage Profion, played by the normally dependable Jeremy Irons. I think it's a good possibility that Irons realized what a stinker he was in and deliberately cheesed it up. At least I hope so.
24
Mr. Freeze
Okay, classic Batman villain Mr. Freeze is already a bad villain - wow, you can't survive at temperatures above freezing. Cool power, bro! Unfortunately, in Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, he's actually made worse. Take a horrendous, pun-filled script and then get Arnold Schwarzenegger in blue makeup to deliver the lines. His goal? Freeze Gotham, because... his wife is dead and his life sucks. This movie was so bad they canned the whole series until Christopher Nolan came in to reboot it.
23
General Terl
The plot of the 2000 bomb Battlefield Earth posits a very interesting question: if the alien Psychlos were all as stupid as John Travolta's General Terl, how the hell did they manage to conquer the Earth? Seriously, Terl is the biggest idiot ever - he gives a human a crash course in all of the Psychlos' technology and then sends him and a bunch of other people unsupervised to a buried military base where there are a bunch of jets and bombs and stuff. And why? To mine gold. Why the frak would an alien care about gold?
22
The Plague
Okay, we didn't go into Hackers thinking that we were going to see world-threatening villainy, but the antics of Eugene "The Plague" Belford were just kind of sad. While the movie's other hackers were foxy Angelina Jolie and well-kept Jonny Lee Miller, Fisher Stevens plays Belford as a dumb schlub who is just interested in shaving pennies off of financial transactions. OH NO NOT THE PENNIES!
21
Jareth
Okay, so casting David Bowie as the villain in your fantasy film is kind of a stroke of genius. It's too bad the film was Labyrinth. As Jareth, the all-powerful King of Goblins, Bowie minces, prances, and scatters glitter everywhere as Jennifer Connelly navigates his diabolical puppet maze. Unfortunately, he doesn't do anything particularly menacing or scary, and in fact he is defeated when Connelly basically says she doesn't want to make out with him. Wow, so the standard emotional trauma of a teenager is all it takes to kick your ass?
20
Dr. Elena Kinder
Movie science can accomplish some pretty ridiculous things, and that often inspires evil geniuses to cook up some monumentally stupid plans. For Dr. Elena Kinder, played by Kathleen Turner in Baby Geniuses, that plan is to experiment on babies to teach them to talk and learn their "universal knowledge." There's a reason this movie is one of Roger Ebert's most hated of all time, people.
19
Conal Cochrane
If you went into Halloween III: Season Of The Witch expecting to see more Michael Myers chopping up suckers, you probably came out sorely disappointed. Instead of featuring the iconic blank-masked killer, the third installment of the franchise introduced... Irish novelty company president Conal Cochrane. Ayyyyup. And his grand evil scheme? Sell Halloween masks with microchips in them (made from pieces of Stonehenge, for God's sake) that make kids faces blow up in gory worm explosions when the most obnoxious TV commercial of all is aired. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!
18
Nuclear Man
It's tough to come up with villains for Superman - he's a dude who can pretty much do anything, your average Joe Criminal isn't going to be able to do a lot about that. By the time Superman IV: The Quest For Peace rolled around, we got this jamoke. Created when Lex Luthor basically science-stapled a piece of Superman's hair to a nuclear missile, the Nuclear Man was powerless outside of sunlight. He managed to beat Superman down by scratching him with his radioactive fingernails, which is just so ghetto, but was undone by his own horniness and tossed into a nuclear reactor.
17
Justin Hammer
There were a lot of problems with Iron Man 2. But one of the biggest was in its choice of villain. Jeff Bridges' Obadiah Stane worked perfectly in the first flick as the dark mirror to Tony Stark's hedonism. Unfortunately, old shell-head doesn't have the best rogues gallery in comics. The sequel pulled out evil industrialist Justin Hammer, played by Sam Rockwell, and it just fell flat. Hammer is a second banana in his own grand scheme, and his presence just means less time for Mickey Rourke's Ivan Vanko.
16
Max Zorin
The thing with James Bond is, as awesome as he is, his villains for the most part are sort of lame. Sure, they have cool henchmen, but aside from Blofield the big bad guys are not as notable, and most of them have spectacularly stupid plans. Take Max Zorin, from A View To A Kill. Played as well as possible by the legendary Christopher Walken, Zorin is not only the product of Nazi medical experiments, he also wants to slaughter millions of people to... corner the microchip market. Yes sir, although he has the resources to burrow beneath the earth and set off bombs in the San Andreas Fault, what he really wants is for your laptop to say "Zorin Inside."
15
Sir August de Wynter
Let's continue our theme of good actors as bad villains - the 1998 film remake of classic British spy show The Avengers was a failure on just about every level, but perhaps the worst was the villain. Played by Sean Connery, Sir August de Wynter bedeviled our heroes with a horrible plot to control... wait for it... the weather! Because August is hot and winter is cold! This would be bad enough, but then throw in the twist that Sir August is a member of a secret evil society that only meets wearing teddy bear costumes and you've got a serious turd sandwich of a big boss.
14
Bennett
Going one-on-one with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime is a task that only the toughest villains should try. That's why Bennett, the main antagonist of 1985's Commando, is so perplexing. Played by Freddie Mercury dead ringer Vernon Wells, Bennett is supposed to be a total badass, but he never actually kills anybody or does anything evil until the end of the movie, at which point he's so thoroughly owned by John Matrix that it's not even funny. Also nice chainmail vest, bro-lord.
13
Laurel Hedare
The 2004 Catwoman movie is an abject disaster for a wide array of reasons, but Sharon Stone's villainess is one of the worst. Laurel Hedare is the CEO of a cosmetics company who is inroducing a new product that makes women look younger and more beautiful - until they stop using it, and then their skin falls off, or something. Uh, so that's basically every cosmetic on the market? And you'd think that after one person had their face melt off, it'd get pulled from Duane Reade faster than you can say "class action lawsuit?" Ah well, Catwoman drops her out of a window anyway.
12
Dennis Nedry
Oh, Dennis Nedry. You loaf of greedy turds, there wouldn't be a Jurassic Park without you. A corporate spy under the employ of BioSyn, Nedry shuts off the park's security system so he can escape with some purloined dinosaur embryos. Unfortunately, the idiot doesn't realize that maybe letting a bunch of alpha carnivores run wild isn't the smartest choice, and he quickly gets his fat ass eaten by a Dilophosaurus.
11
Nero
So the villain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot just existed to get his ass beat down by Kirk, but that didn't mean he had to be so ass lame. Not only is Nero a generic "destroy everything" antagonist, he's also... from the future. Dude, if I got sent back in time a hundred-plus years, I would be betting on so many football games it isn't even funny. Eric Bana's performance is also totally weird, and he's barely on screen during the flick, which doesn't give him any time to get better.
10
Gallian
Evil wizards always blow. It's just hard to be threatening when you're waiting for the post-production effects guys to fill in as your offense. It's even harder when you're being directed by Uwe Boll. Gallian, the evil villain of Boll's 2008 stinker In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, is played with characteristic vigor by Ray Liotta, not somebody we would have pegged for a fantasy warlock. The fact that the flick is basically a low-rent Lord of the Rings minus the ring doesn't help.
9
Millard Findlemeyer
Or, as you may know him, the Gingerdead Man. Played by Gary Busey, Findlemeyer is actually a crazed serial killer who massacres a bunch of people at a Waco diner before being nabbed by the cops and sent to the electric chair. Through a chain of events too stupid to recount, he is reincarnated as a sentient human-sized gingerbread man and he sets out for revenge on the survivors of his massacre. And then he's defeated when somebody eats his head.
8
Elliot Carver
We return to the Bond franchise with perhaps the nadir in Bondery, Pierce Brosnan's dismal '90s run. His second outing as 007 put him up against media baron Elliot Carver, who wants to start World War 3 so more people watch his news channel. Okay, real quick: this worked for William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish-American War, but there were a few differences back then: first and foremost, they didn't have nukes back then. The prospect of mutually assured destruction doesn't seem to faze him in the slightest, but he commits a rookie Bond mistake by lecturing 007 about his plan for just long enough to be pushed into the path of a giant drill.
7
King Koopa
It may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to pick on the disastrous Super Mario Bros. movie, but really, how does Hollywood magic transform a giant, green, fire-breathing lizard into Dennis Hopper with the worst haircut of his life? Sure, at the end of the movie the evil King Koopa does transform into a huge reptile, but at no point do Mario and Luigi either throw fireballs at him or chop down his bridge with an axe. But we do get some of Hopper's most demented overacting ever as the Goombas are mustered.
6
Zorg
Oh, Gary Oldman. I like to think you play a little game with yourself where you ask "How bananas can I go in this movie?" In Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, he plays evil industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, outfitted with the most ludicrous pageboy-flop haircut, teeny little Brazilian wax goatee, and inexpicable mush-mouthed Southern accent. And he almost dies choking on a cherry, for God's sake.
5
The Architect
The first Matrix movie introduced an incredibly iconic villain in Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith, so it's not surprising that the pair of awful sequels found a way to piss all over that. For instance, when Neo finally meets the Architect, the guiding intelligence behind the whole ball of wax that is the Matrix. Leave it to the Wachowski brothers to make the big confrontation with the villain as boring as humanly possible. It's not like we wanted a fistfight, but can anybody sit through his speeches and remain awake?
4
General Grievous
The Star Wars prequels certainly had diminishing returns when it came to villains - everybody loved Darth Maul, but after a dude with two lightsabers, where do you go? Leave it to the genius of George Lucas to come up with an answer - four lightsabers. And thus, we have General Grievous from Revenge Of The Sith. Introduced as an absolute supreme badass, you'd expect the climactic showdown with him to be an insurmountable challenge for Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is outarmed - literally - by the hacking cyborg. Instead, Kenobi makes short work of him and he's never seen again.
3
The Uber Morlock
Oh, man, Jeremy Irons appearing on this list twice? The early 2000s must have been pretty freaking rough for him. His performance as the Uber-Morlock in Simon Wells' The Time Machine is an abject failure for a number of reasons - it's never really established why he's battling our time-traveling protagonist, he doesn't want the time machine for his own use, and Lord could he use some sunlight.
2
King Galbatorix
What is it that makes normally competent actors slum it in horrendous fantasy movies? I mean, besides the paycheck. I know John Malkovich has armoires to buy, but there's really no excuse for his performance as King Galbatorix in Eragon. Dude is literally one of the most phoned-in villains of all time - despite the script telling us what an evil badass he is, he doesn't do anything but sit on his throne and tell us how sad he is.
1
Venom
So the whole point of Venom is that Eddie Brock is a more physically imposing specimen than Peter Parker, so the symbiote costume boosts that natural power and makes him the hulking juggernaut of pain we all know and love. That's why casting Topher Grace as Brock in the third Spidey movie was so idiotic. Okay, yes, Topher Grace is slightly bigger than Tobey Maguire, but really. That 70's Show does not make a villain. Well, except for Ashton Kutcher.
A hero needs a villain, or so the poets say, but the 25 jamokes on this list probably should have thought twice. Lame plans, goofy outfits, bad hairstyles - these inept antagonists have it all.
25
Profion
There are a lot of problems with 2000's Dungeons & Dragons, like expecting Marlon Wayans to sell the movie as one of your leads. But perhaps the biggest is the insane scenery-chewing of Mage Profion, played by the normally dependable Jeremy Irons. I think it's a good possibility that Irons realized what a stinker he was in and deliberately cheesed it up. At least I hope so.
24
Mr. Freeze
Okay, classic Batman villain Mr. Freeze is already a bad villain - wow, you can't survive at temperatures above freezing. Cool power, bro! Unfortunately, in Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, he's actually made worse. Take a horrendous, pun-filled script and then get Arnold Schwarzenegger in blue makeup to deliver the lines. His goal? Freeze Gotham, because... his wife is dead and his life sucks. This movie was so bad they canned the whole series until Christopher Nolan came in to reboot it.
23
General Terl
The plot of the 2000 bomb Battlefield Earth posits a very interesting question: if the alien Psychlos were all as stupid as John Travolta's General Terl, how the hell did they manage to conquer the Earth? Seriously, Terl is the biggest idiot ever - he gives a human a crash course in all of the Psychlos' technology and then sends him and a bunch of other people unsupervised to a buried military base where there are a bunch of jets and bombs and stuff. And why? To mine gold. Why the frak would an alien care about gold?
22
The Plague
Okay, we didn't go into Hackers thinking that we were going to see world-threatening villainy, but the antics of Eugene "The Plague" Belford were just kind of sad. While the movie's other hackers were foxy Angelina Jolie and well-kept Jonny Lee Miller, Fisher Stevens plays Belford as a dumb schlub who is just interested in shaving pennies off of financial transactions. OH NO NOT THE PENNIES!
21
Jareth
Okay, so casting David Bowie as the villain in your fantasy film is kind of a stroke of genius. It's too bad the film was Labyrinth. As Jareth, the all-powerful King of Goblins, Bowie minces, prances, and scatters glitter everywhere as Jennifer Connelly navigates his diabolical puppet maze. Unfortunately, he doesn't do anything particularly menacing or scary, and in fact he is defeated when Connelly basically says she doesn't want to make out with him. Wow, so the standard emotional trauma of a teenager is all it takes to kick your ass?
20
Dr. Elena Kinder
Movie science can accomplish some pretty ridiculous things, and that often inspires evil geniuses to cook up some monumentally stupid plans. For Dr. Elena Kinder, played by Kathleen Turner in Baby Geniuses, that plan is to experiment on babies to teach them to talk and learn their "universal knowledge." There's a reason this movie is one of Roger Ebert's most hated of all time, people.
19
Conal Cochrane
If you went into Halloween III: Season Of The Witch expecting to see more Michael Myers chopping up suckers, you probably came out sorely disappointed. Instead of featuring the iconic blank-masked killer, the third installment of the franchise introduced... Irish novelty company president Conal Cochrane. Ayyyyup. And his grand evil scheme? Sell Halloween masks with microchips in them (made from pieces of Stonehenge, for God's sake) that make kids faces blow up in gory worm explosions when the most obnoxious TV commercial of all is aired. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!
18
Nuclear Man
It's tough to come up with villains for Superman - he's a dude who can pretty much do anything, your average Joe Criminal isn't going to be able to do a lot about that. By the time Superman IV: The Quest For Peace rolled around, we got this jamoke. Created when Lex Luthor basically science-stapled a piece of Superman's hair to a nuclear missile, the Nuclear Man was powerless outside of sunlight. He managed to beat Superman down by scratching him with his radioactive fingernails, which is just so ghetto, but was undone by his own horniness and tossed into a nuclear reactor.
17
Justin Hammer
There were a lot of problems with Iron Man 2. But one of the biggest was in its choice of villain. Jeff Bridges' Obadiah Stane worked perfectly in the first flick as the dark mirror to Tony Stark's hedonism. Unfortunately, old shell-head doesn't have the best rogues gallery in comics. The sequel pulled out evil industrialist Justin Hammer, played by Sam Rockwell, and it just fell flat. Hammer is a second banana in his own grand scheme, and his presence just means less time for Mickey Rourke's Ivan Vanko.
16
Max Zorin
The thing with James Bond is, as awesome as he is, his villains for the most part are sort of lame. Sure, they have cool henchmen, but aside from Blofield the big bad guys are not as notable, and most of them have spectacularly stupid plans. Take Max Zorin, from A View To A Kill. Played as well as possible by the legendary Christopher Walken, Zorin is not only the product of Nazi medical experiments, he also wants to slaughter millions of people to... corner the microchip market. Yes sir, although he has the resources to burrow beneath the earth and set off bombs in the San Andreas Fault, what he really wants is for your laptop to say "Zorin Inside."
15
Sir August de Wynter
Let's continue our theme of good actors as bad villains - the 1998 film remake of classic British spy show The Avengers was a failure on just about every level, but perhaps the worst was the villain. Played by Sean Connery, Sir August de Wynter bedeviled our heroes with a horrible plot to control... wait for it... the weather! Because August is hot and winter is cold! This would be bad enough, but then throw in the twist that Sir August is a member of a secret evil society that only meets wearing teddy bear costumes and you've got a serious turd sandwich of a big boss.
14
Bennett
Going one-on-one with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime is a task that only the toughest villains should try. That's why Bennett, the main antagonist of 1985's Commando, is so perplexing. Played by Freddie Mercury dead ringer Vernon Wells, Bennett is supposed to be a total badass, but he never actually kills anybody or does anything evil until the end of the movie, at which point he's so thoroughly owned by John Matrix that it's not even funny. Also nice chainmail vest, bro-lord.
13
Laurel Hedare
The 2004 Catwoman movie is an abject disaster for a wide array of reasons, but Sharon Stone's villainess is one of the worst. Laurel Hedare is the CEO of a cosmetics company who is inroducing a new product that makes women look younger and more beautiful - until they stop using it, and then their skin falls off, or something. Uh, so that's basically every cosmetic on the market? And you'd think that after one person had their face melt off, it'd get pulled from Duane Reade faster than you can say "class action lawsuit?" Ah well, Catwoman drops her out of a window anyway.
12
Dennis Nedry
Oh, Dennis Nedry. You loaf of greedy turds, there wouldn't be a Jurassic Park without you. A corporate spy under the employ of BioSyn, Nedry shuts off the park's security system so he can escape with some purloined dinosaur embryos. Unfortunately, the idiot doesn't realize that maybe letting a bunch of alpha carnivores run wild isn't the smartest choice, and he quickly gets his fat ass eaten by a Dilophosaurus.
11
Nero
So the villain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot just existed to get his ass beat down by Kirk, but that didn't mean he had to be so ass lame. Not only is Nero a generic "destroy everything" antagonist, he's also... from the future. Dude, if I got sent back in time a hundred-plus years, I would be betting on so many football games it isn't even funny. Eric Bana's performance is also totally weird, and he's barely on screen during the flick, which doesn't give him any time to get better.
10
Gallian
Evil wizards always blow. It's just hard to be threatening when you're waiting for the post-production effects guys to fill in as your offense. It's even harder when you're being directed by Uwe Boll. Gallian, the evil villain of Boll's 2008 stinker In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, is played with characteristic vigor by Ray Liotta, not somebody we would have pegged for a fantasy warlock. The fact that the flick is basically a low-rent Lord of the Rings minus the ring doesn't help.
9
Millard Findlemeyer
Or, as you may know him, the Gingerdead Man. Played by Gary Busey, Findlemeyer is actually a crazed serial killer who massacres a bunch of people at a Waco diner before being nabbed by the cops and sent to the electric chair. Through a chain of events too stupid to recount, he is reincarnated as a sentient human-sized gingerbread man and he sets out for revenge on the survivors of his massacre. And then he's defeated when somebody eats his head.
8
Elliot Carver
We return to the Bond franchise with perhaps the nadir in Bondery, Pierce Brosnan's dismal '90s run. His second outing as 007 put him up against media baron Elliot Carver, who wants to start World War 3 so more people watch his news channel. Okay, real quick: this worked for William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish-American War, but there were a few differences back then: first and foremost, they didn't have nukes back then. The prospect of mutually assured destruction doesn't seem to faze him in the slightest, but he commits a rookie Bond mistake by lecturing 007 about his plan for just long enough to be pushed into the path of a giant drill.
7
King Koopa
It may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to pick on the disastrous Super Mario Bros. movie, but really, how does Hollywood magic transform a giant, green, fire-breathing lizard into Dennis Hopper with the worst haircut of his life? Sure, at the end of the movie the evil King Koopa does transform into a huge reptile, but at no point do Mario and Luigi either throw fireballs at him or chop down his bridge with an axe. But we do get some of Hopper's most demented overacting ever as the Goombas are mustered.
6
Zorg
Oh, Gary Oldman. I like to think you play a little game with yourself where you ask "How bananas can I go in this movie?" In Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, he plays evil industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, outfitted with the most ludicrous pageboy-flop haircut, teeny little Brazilian wax goatee, and inexpicable mush-mouthed Southern accent. And he almost dies choking on a cherry, for God's sake.
5
The Architect
The first Matrix movie introduced an incredibly iconic villain in Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith, so it's not surprising that the pair of awful sequels found a way to piss all over that. For instance, when Neo finally meets the Architect, the guiding intelligence behind the whole ball of wax that is the Matrix. Leave it to the Wachowski brothers to make the big confrontation with the villain as boring as humanly possible. It's not like we wanted a fistfight, but can anybody sit through his speeches and remain awake?
4
General Grievous
The Star Wars prequels certainly had diminishing returns when it came to villains - everybody loved Darth Maul, but after a dude with two lightsabers, where do you go? Leave it to the genius of George Lucas to come up with an answer - four lightsabers. And thus, we have General Grievous from Revenge Of The Sith. Introduced as an absolute supreme badass, you'd expect the climactic showdown with him to be an insurmountable challenge for Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is outarmed - literally - by the hacking cyborg. Instead, Kenobi makes short work of him and he's never seen again.
3
The Uber Morlock
Oh, man, Jeremy Irons appearing on this list twice? The early 2000s must have been pretty freaking rough for him. His performance as the Uber-Morlock in Simon Wells' The Time Machine is an abject failure for a number of reasons - it's never really established why he's battling our time-traveling protagonist, he doesn't want the time machine for his own use, and Lord could he use some sunlight.
2
King Galbatorix
What is it that makes normally competent actors slum it in horrendous fantasy movies? I mean, besides the paycheck. I know John Malkovich has armoires to buy, but there's really no excuse for his performance as King Galbatorix in Eragon. Dude is literally one of the most phoned-in villains of all time - despite the script telling us what an evil badass he is, he doesn't do anything but sit on his throne and tell us how sad he is.
1
Venom
So the whole point of Venom is that Eddie Brock is a more physically imposing specimen than Peter Parker, so the symbiote costume boosts that natural power and makes him the hulking juggernaut of pain we all know and love. That's why casting Topher Grace as Brock in the third Spidey movie was so idiotic. Okay, yes, Topher Grace is slightly bigger than Tobey Maguire, but really. That 70's Show does not make a villain. Well, except for Ashton Kutcher.