Top 10 Pathetic Movie Villains

All movie heroes live or die because of the villains. If not for Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker would have had a humdrum (yes, ho-hum, too) background; Batman would have been fighting grime instead of crime if The Joker wasn’t there for him to figure out; and James Bond would probably be working in a small cubicle filing documents if it weren’t for Blofeld, et al. But just as there are ersatz super heroes, there are also cardboard cut-out, cheap copy cat, discounted price villain understudies whose sole reason for existence is to merely get kicked around by the heroes. So let’s celebrate the top 10 pathetic movie villains in cinema history; these miserable guys who either lack the power, the competence or clearly don’t have a clue on how to be fantastic bad guys, they obviously wouldn’t know how to take over the universe if they were the last ten people alive on Earth.

A villain played by an unknown actor named George Pillow seems a little bit counter productive. Nuclear Man was dumb as a rail and liked ugly women. There is nothing menacing about that. He was not bigger than Superman, at six foot four they were the same height. His outfit was a little bit cooler than Superman's suit and he had that long and wavy blonde hair that chicks go for. There is nothing menacing about that either. The lamest part about this supposed bad ass was that Superman destroyed him by dropping him into a nuclear reactor. Should that not have made him stronger? It was, after all, his power source. The only time I was worried during the movie was when he threatened Superman with his long, nuclear charged fingernails and even then, I was more worried he would break a nail than anything he might do to the Super dude.

Maybe they should have called him Manicure Man. That is definitely more menacing.

Talk about pathetic, can you imagine having the super power of being half toad? The only reason he went bad is that they would not have him in the super heroes club. How do you tell people that they should fear you because you can jump like a frog? I would be more worried about getting warts than anything else. While you have to admire his kung fu tongue grip, or just the length of his tongue, the guy just was not intimidating. The super hero Storm fried him up relatively easy and had he not fallen into the ocean, she would have ripped his legs off and had a pretty good meal.

The only kind of grief Grievous is giving is the kind moviegoers experienced while trying to stay awake. This multi-armed wheezer had most people wheezing to get out of their seats. How does a machine-like villain with no lungs wheeze anyway? Was he low on engine oil? The big guy talked a good game and his chosen vehicle for trying to escape the Jedi Master Kenobi was pretty cool but apart from that, he was pretty lame. For one thing, if he was such a bad-ass, why was he running in the first place? He and his prophylactic troops had the Jedi outnumbered about a zillion to one. Besides, numbers should not matter. A true villain likes to fight.

Of all the bad guys that Bond… James Bond, ever faced, Le Chiffre was without a doubt the most non-threatening, non-scary of them all. In all the other Bond movies, the bad guy at least had a menacing henchman to do his dirty work. The big guy with the steel teeth, the fat Chinese dude with the sharp edged hat, Robert Shaw who could take a kick in the nuts without flinching, and even the semi-midget chick with the knife in her school teacher shoes were scarier and more threatening than petite Le Chiffre. The dude even cried tears of blood when he got a little tense. This not so bad, bad guy even failed the final, ultimate bad guy test. Moments before his death, instead of telling his killer that he would see him in HELL or issuing some other tough until death threat; he begged and pleaded for his lame little life. How pathetic was that? Very!

They took a perfectly scary looking guy in Schwarzenegger and covered all those intimidating muscles with a big, bulky tin suit. Arnold is much meaner looking without the set-up. Having the ability to withstand the cold was just about all Freeze could do without his diamond powered ice guns. The popsicled bad guy was not much of a match for Batman even if it was the George Clooney version with nipples on the outside of his suit. (I never understood that.) Mr. Freeze was about as scary as Mr. Kind of cool outside or Mr. Springtime weather and Batman is deserving of a much stronger and scarier opponent. They should have saved his character for just Robin or maybe as a stand-in for Bugs Bunny. Yes, he was that pathetic.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy had its share of really threatening bad guys but Sauron was not one of them. If he were around today, we could send a midget with hairy feet and a big bottle of Visine up that mountain and take the red out of his electronic eye with the quickness. The one thing that kills the pathetic bad guys in movies such as this one (or three) is that the minions that do his evil bidding are even more frightening than he was. Those ring wraiths were pretty wicked. Sauron himself was nothing more than a big eyesore that had already been defeated by a paper cut to the fingers given to him by an already wounded king. An eye on a mountaintop just is not very intimidating; I do not care what he can see.

Okay, Satan is supposed to be the dark prince from hell that is the second most powerful thing anywhere at anytime. He is the ultimate tormentor of humanity. However, in the exorcist, the worst he can do is take-over a child's body. When he tried it with an alcoholic priest who was low on faith, the priest jumped out a window with Satan inside him and stopped his carnage right in its tracks before he could do any more damage than that. Satan was no big scary deal in the exorcist unless you are a yuppie child of a bad, booze-slugging actress.

Devil--go scare someone else.

Talk about a pathetic villain, the Fantastic 4 movie produces a whopper. Galactus is a God-like creature that moves through the universe engulfing planets with life as food. He has captured a creature from one of those worlds and in exchange for not consuming it, forces the Silver Surfer to go before him, find, and ready these planetary snacks. This almighty being arrives at Earth but the surfer changes his mind and rides into Galactus, supposedly killing him. Why did he not do that to start with? Galactus is pathetic because for such a massive threat, he was too easy to kill.

First, I find it hard to be intimidated by anything that comes from a planet named Tatooine. It sounds like a place drunks go to get their ex-girlfriends name tattooed on their arms. That is not the only reason this "bad guy" is a bad idea. Am I supposed to be impressed by a giant slug crime lord? He does not even appear devious. If you set aside the fact that he looks like something I would sneeze out of my nasal cavity during a nasty cold, there is just nothing menacing about him. His arms are so short he cannot wipe his own ass, presuming he has one. He has no legs so outrunning him, provided I could run while laughing so hard, would not present itself as a problem. In the end he just got strangled with a chain by Princess Leya, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it.

I am sorry Mr. Lucas; Jabba the Hutt is not a very scary villain. Compared to Darth Vader, Jabba the Hutt is Ralph Nader.

In the movie Commando, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the villain, Bennett never fights anyone until the final scenes with Arnold. He just is not that threatening. Granted it is hard to look tough next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and there are not more than a handful of people who could pull it off, still, you would think they would have had the actor do a couple of push-ups or something to get pumped. Bennett's character was supposed to be a member of Armhold Musclehugger's old Special Forces Commando team, after all, and those guys should have all looked just like Matrix (Schwarzenegger) Then the weenie has to hold a knife to Musclehugger's daughter and he really gets off on doing it.

I am sorry to say to director Mark L. Lester that we, the movie going public just did not fear him. In fact, 40% of the movie audience wanted to kick his ass before Arnold could get to him. The other 60% did not bother to wake up.