6 Famous Movie Villains Whose Evil Schemes Make Zero Sense
As we've pointed out more than a few times on the site, even the most iconic movie villains occasionally find themselves wrapped up in kooky master plans that seem like they were specifically designed to punch reason in the brain. Sometimes it's a perfectly executed gambit that retrospectively hangs on dream logic, and other times it's an evil scheme so convoluted that it would make Rube Goldberg use a contraption made of lifts and pulleys to elaborately shit his pants.
Then there are those villains who opt to skip the over-complicated planning entirely and instead go for schemes that make no goddamn sense right from the very first nefarious laugh. Like these ones!
Thanos, Obsessed With Finding The Infinity Stones, Gives His Only Infinity Stone Away
In the post-credits scene for Age Of Ultron, Thanos walks to his space vault and dons the singular rhinestone Infinity Gauntlet, like a big, vengeful Michael Jackson. As the film cuts to black, his vow to "do it myself" no doubt shocked theatergoers everywhere at the revelation that Thanos can actually walk ... let alone do anything himself beside float in space like a bulky fuchsia lump of cosmic shit.
He's probably also taking one while he sits on that thing.
To recap, Thanos has been with us since the first Avengers, in which he gave Loki a magic scepter to go to Earth and retrieve the Tesseract, a magic interdimensional box that happens to contain one of the six Infinity Stones that Thanos needs to rule the universe or to finally bang Death ( seriously!) or whatever. It's insanity. Anyway, we later find out in Avengers: Age Of James Spader that the scepter Thanos gave Loki had an Infinity Stone inside it the whole time.
It's like a nesting doll of MacGuffins.
This means one of two things: Either Thanos was too dense to know that he already had one of the Stones in his possession or he willingly gave it away to Loki -- the god of deceit -- to run an errand for him that he easily could have done himself. But Loki gets captured, the scepter gets cracked open, and the stone is shoved into Vision's forehead. And so Thanos goes from having one Stone to zero Stones, PLUS a brand-new magic British android who wants to kick his ass. But hey, live and learn -- right?
"Hey, give me Cap's shield, too. I want to Instagram this."
Oh, wait ... he doesn't do that either, because in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Thanos makes the exact same error by entrusting the retrieval of a second Stone to Ronan -- a sourpuss health goth who seems to despise him and ends up micro-managing the operation by sending Gamora on her own backstabbing mission for the Stone.
No one's been this careless about a bunch of stones since Mick and Keith quit giving a shit.
In other words, Thanos once again outsourced the simple-yet-dire task of retrieving ultimate power to a questionable servant ... who in turn outsourced it to a second person. Did I mention that Gamora is also Thanos' bitter, adopted daughter? And by "adopted," I mean Thanos murdered her family and begrudgingly raised her like Harry Potter's uncle and aunt. What the fuck kind of chain of command is Thanos running? He's like the supervillain equivalent of a methed-out pizza store manager letting his shitty friends run the register while he shotguns beers in the walk-in.
Everything The Capitol Does In The Hunger Games Is Stupid
Anytime a writer forms a world on the foundation of some philosophical or contemporary allegory, the result instantly falls apart the moment you stretch the story to its logical limits. For example: The more we overstayed the universe of The Matrix, a self-contained techno fable about human consciousness, the more it strained under its own hogwash until finally exploding into a bunch of Nordic ravers.
Even the most complex, evolving computer network imaginable couldn't crack the code to make white guy dreads look cool.
Like The Matrix, The Hunger Games was founded on an abstract concept with the hope that people didn't think too hard about the completely insane nuts and bolts holding it all together.
According to the backstory, the annual Hunger Games were created as punishment for a rebellion that occurred against the Capitol 74 years ago. Since then, the wealthy few have managed to set up elaborate and high-tech death arenas, while the rest of the districts were left to starve. That's all well and good, except for the fact that the 12 dying districts are also in charge of the entire country's natural resources in a time of post-apocalypse. Remember: Each district is there to harvest one societal necessity, like mineral goods, textiles, and electricity. They are each vital organs to the full being that is this country, and the Capitol is slowly killing them out of spite, like an alcoholic noir detective.
They think fishing and livestock are tragic missteps in evolution.
This is a Capitol with seemingly endless technological prowess, sullenly forcing their agricultural and industrial arm to work like 19th-century peasants. To put that in the insane perspective it deserves: Imagine if, at the end of the Civil War, America forced all the former Confederate states to fight each other for sport until well into World War II. That's the level of illogical, anti-evolutionary spite the Capitol is harboring here. But even in a world where we accept the fact that the Capitol is just shitty and evil, spending billions on a deathmatch lottery still doesn't make any sense from the perspective of this ashy-mane jackass:
First Battle Royale, now a Snow who knows nothing -- is there anything this story won't rip off?
In the first film, President Snow justifies the Hunger Games by saying that the best way to control the masses is with "hope." And thus was created a game where civilians are forced to grapple for horrified onlookers.
Hey, here's an idea ... maybe just have a lottery? Like a simple lottery where every year one randomly chosen family wins the right to live in the Capitol. That's a way less expensive way to give people hope, right? Or, if you still want to kill people, perhaps make the Hunger Games a volunteer reward system for each district's most moronically brave, instead of forcing a bunch of waifish, terrified, randomly selected children to fight to the death? There are so many good "hope" options to choose from that aren't "randomly murder children to keep the subjugated in perpetual despair."
It barely helps to remind yourself that they were all teenagers, and thus probably assholes.
See, the Capitol makes sense only if you imagine that their goal is to embody a ridiculous villain. In terms of running an actual government, it's sheer nonsense that they could possibly have held onto such a self-destructive grudge while successfully maintaining their fancy-beard society. The country would've imploded in like a decade -- it wouldn't have taken 74 years of people waiting around for the perfect hapless oaf to be the symbol of their revolution.
There's No Good Reason To Weaponize Raptors In Jurassic World
It's a regular sci-fi trope that, when some kind of alien or monster is introduced to humanity, there's always an ominous corporation fully erect at the idea of weaponizing the creatures for their own monetary purposes. In Alien, it's Weyland-Yutani. In Resident Evil, it's the Umbrella Corporation. And in Jurassic World, it's InGen attempting to turn velociraptors into guitar-shredding war machines.
"Stegosaurs, come put and play-yay ..."
In the film, the escape of the demon-lizard Indominus Rex is used to test the ground-war capabilities of weaponized raptors. The idea being, if the test is successful (Spoiler: It isn't), the army could eventually use these clever girls to help fight ground wars, which is the sort of plan a drunk child would come up with while playing with Jurassic Park action figures.
Hey, wanna see another predator?
If Chris Pratt had one of these things, we'd have been in and out of the theater in two minutes.
That's the General Atomics MQ-1 aerial drone, one of many flying nightmares the United States has at its fingertips. See, modern America doesn't really need to put boots on the ground, and would realistically have zero practical reason to parachute a squad of fucking prehistoric claw goblins into the Middle East.
As we've talked about on the site, turning animals into weapons has historically pretty much stopped at strapping bombs to them, or possibly recon. If releasing wild monsters into the den of the enemy was a practical idea, we would have spent most of the 1940s catapulting lions at Nazis. In the end, you're just causing way more problems than you're solving by dumping a super-predator into a population center and then having to wrangle them when the blood-dust clears before they eat anyone they're not supposed to. It's such nonsense that you have to wonder how InGen managed to get this far with the idea. Seriously, what was that goddamn conversation even like? Had they even approached the Army with this pitch, or were they going to surprise them with a raptor-sized cake?
The old "stripper in a cake" gag shouldn't end with the stripper eating both the cake and you.
And for fuck's sake ... raptors aren't bulletproof. You could decapitate one of those billion-dollar investments with a shotgun blast. They don't shoot guns or hack computers. They serve zero tactical advantage besides looking scary, acting erratic, and occasionally knowing how to open doors. You can get the same results by sticking a Scream mask on a crackhead.
Magneto Just Makes Shit Up As He Goes In X-Men: Days Of Future Past
As a noble Britishman, everything that escapes Ian McKellen's mouth sounds like it was aged in wooden casks stored under the floorboards of Winston Churchill's tea cellar. And while he may not be from England, even Michael Fassbender's steel demeanor looks like it was birthed from alchemist sorcery. It's the shared European stoicism of these two actors that masks the true fact that Magneto is actually kind of a creepy simpleton dressed like Space Dracula.
It's hard to pass yourself off as the embodiment of evolution while wearing your Snuggie the wrong way.
Think about it. In Days Of Future Past, Wolverine gets time-warped back to the 1970s to stop Mystique from being captured and having her DNA used to create the ultra-adaptive Sentinels that will one day doom mankind. Her folly comes while successfully assassinating the mustachioed mutant-racist Bolivar Trask, whose death sparks the until-then-ignored need for killer robots to defend humanity against the super-powered minorities living among them. Wolverine teams up with the Heroin Diaries alternate costume of Charles Xavier to free Magneto from prison to help, but Magneto quickly decides to adopt an alternative plan of action and just kill Mystique.
One of the most powerful and destructive mutants in history can't think of any better weapon than a handgun.
His reasoning is that killing Mystique will prevent the Sentinels from ever having any chance to capture her and use her DNA, which is what gives them the ability to adapt to any mutant's power in time-traveling Wolverine's blasted future. Magneto's logic is admittedly sound, but the thing is, he completely fails to kill Mystique -- he just ends up wounding the naked blue ginger in the street, leaving enough of her blood just lying around for Trask and company to get the DNA they need. Even if nobody had stopped him from shooting Mystique while they were all in Trask's office, the end result would've been the same -- Trask would've just squeegeed her powerful mutant blood off of his fancy meeting table and gone to work on his army of apocalyptic race-war bots.
In between rounds of starring in every '70s porn ever made.
What I'm digging at here is that despite all his grandiosity, Magneto is really just making shit up as he goes along, like a Ben Stiller character. Later in the film, he decides to possess Trask's robots and turn them on the human crowd in a grand attempt to assassinate the president on live TV ... but not before making a flying entrance and dumping RFK Stadium on the White House lawn. He then makes a televised statement to the entire world, making sure that everyone knows Magneto is responsible for murdering the president and all his fancy friends.
"That'll teach 'em not to defend themselves."
Hey, why not just make it look like the robots malfunctioned instead of showing everyone that you can control them? Remember, the goal of this entire mission is to make sure that these robots never get made. If the Sentinels go apeshit during their first public demonstration and wind up killing the leader of the free world, those things would all have been dismantled and Trask would've been tossed in federal prison for the rest of his life. Conversely, Magneto swooping in and eradicating the executive branch of the United States government on live television is only going to further convince the world of its need for a fleet of anti-mutant Iron Giants. Even if killing Trask and all of his supporters was part of Magneto's plan from the beginning ... then why didn't he try to kill Trask earlier? You know, when he was standing right fucking next to him in Trask's office?
"Wait, I just realized I'm a mutant too."
"Really!?!"
"Yeah, my power is being able to witness your bullshit plan without having a seizure."
Shit, just make the robots malfunction and explode during the demonstration so both Trask and the mutant-hating politicians get iced. Anything besides flying in like a grandiose wizard to declare war on mankind after you've been specifically told by a mind reader and his pet time-traveler not to do that.
And, speaking of mind reading: While we're just throwing out ideas, I can't help but point out that Charles Xavier has the ability to erase memories. We see him do this in Young X-Men Chronicles: Part 1, Mystery Of The Spooky Cave. So, really, all of this could have been just as easily solved by Xavier making Trask forget all about the Sentinel program, preferably through some amazing courtship.
Heads of state kiss the pope's ring with more lust and passion.
Speaking of chilling sex scenes ...
The Sex Phantom In It Follows Is Terrible At Its Job
It Follows is a haunting breath of fresh air amid the blah of jump-scare and torture porn that seems to dominate the box office. For serious, guys ... if you haven't seen this movie yet, go check it out on iTunes or Amazon -- then come back to this article to learn why it makes no goddamned sense.
While doing a great job at telling us very little, the movie outlines some simple rules for how the phantom/demon/alien thing does its business: It can look like anyone it wants (including the loved ones of the victims) and will slowly advance until it ... uh ... does this:
Sadly, not the worst thing that could happen thanks to incest.
That's from a particularly fun scene where the phantom takes the form of a dude's mother to gain access to his room and dry-humps him to death. This isn't the only time it happens, either -- the perverted demon later chooses to look like our main character's father to screw with her head, as well as masquerading as one of her friends to get close to her. That means this thing is making conscious decisions about what form to take, and for some inexplicable reason, 90 percent of the time it decides to look like this:
"Oh, shit, white guys. RUN!"
Quick, what do a feral child and a 7-foot-tall man with hooded eyes have in common? They're both clearly monsters. The first time we see the sex demon, back when our hero doesn't quite believe it exists yet and is tied up in a warehouse, it shows up as a completely naked woman for some daffy reason. Why not just roll in there as a cop like the T-1000? Or anything besides the weirdest goddamn thing it could think of? The second time, when our hero still isn't convinced, the demon shows up like this:
Every teen's nightmare: grandma moving in.
Just take the form of someone she knows, you shapeshifting maniac! We all know you can! We see it happen multiple times later in the film to wild success. And yet, every time it attacks the main character, it keeps taking the form of creepy naked weirdos and grotesque randoms for seemingly no other reason than to make the task harder on itself. At one point in the movie, it takes the form of a completely naked man, standing on top of a house.
"Is that the demon or Will Ferrell?"
Is this monster fucking drunk? Who the hell is that going to fool? At least drunkenness would help explain why it walks everywhere instead of zipping around on a demon skateboard or something.
Turning John Connor Into A Robot Is The Stupidest Move Skynet Could Make
In Terminator Genisys, the latest installment in the series everyone in the universe stopped giving a shit about 24 years ago, we learn that champion of humanity John Connor was assimilated by the evil Skynet and transformed into a time-traveling robot. Before you get angry about the lack of spoiler tags, please note that this compelling plot twist was spoiled by the movie's fucking poster.
Which was a terrific advertisement for every other movie in the theater.
See, when Kyle Reese jumps back to the 1984 timeline of the original film, a physical manifestation of Skynet attacks future John Connor and transforms him into a robot on a cellular level, meaning that the robot version of him is still technically him and not a copy ... Jesus Christ. With me so far? OK, so then Skynet sends Robot John Connor back to 2014 to ensure that Skynet is created and allowed to erase all humanity. His clearly stated mission is to protect Skynet at all costs.
Let's do a little time-traveling of our own, back to the scene in which Skynet decides to turn John Connor into its robot errand boy after choosing him from a room full of other people:
It was the riskiest move by a big blue orb since Zordon hired teenagers to defend the Universe.
Skynet then sent him back in time specifically to protect the creation of Skynet from anyone who would have the foresight to destroy it. In other words: Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese ... John Connor's future parents. Predictably, Robot Connor is 100 percent unable to kill these two bozos because he will cease to exist if he does, thus failing his mission. Robot Connor points out this conundrum in the film and is put in numerous situations where he tries to talk Sarah and Reese into joining him and letting Skynet turn them both into robots. Any other Terminator sent back by Skynet would've just blown them both away immediately and accomplished its mission.
So why, out of a room filled with people, did Skynet choose to mechanize the only person who would be physically incapable of destroying its enemies? For all they knew, Sarah and Kyle could have already boned back in 1984, and Robot John Connor would find himself in 2014 awkwardly squaring off against a 33-year-old version of himself that he would be equally unable to kill. Honestly, it's like they didn't even put any thought into this movie about an elderly robot from the future.
An eight-figure salary for this? I'd trollface too.
David thinks Terminator Genisys is the third-best Terminator movie ever. You can reach him on Twitter.
Also check out 6 Stupid Characters That Hollywood Now Puts In Every Movie and 5 'Jurassic Park' Plot Holes With Horrifying Implications.
