6 Movie Heroes (Who Sucked At Their Jobs)

The exorcist from The Exorcist. If you've been seduced by Satan, bedazzled by Beelzebub or just want some free wine and wafers, then Father Merrin is your go-to guy.

Why He Should Be Good At His Job:

Father Merrin is the Vatican's point man when it comes to Satanic possession. When a little girl from Georgetown starts inexplicably acting like GG Allin, her mom hires Merrin to exorcise the demon. The man's street cred alone should be enough to kick Lucifer in his fiery red nutsack.

Why He Sucked At It:

When a film begins, the audience is generally treated to a scene of the protagonist doing something totally gee-whiz--be it Indiana Jones cracking his whip or pornstar Lisa Ann getting manwiched by a gang of lost pizza delivery boys.

In a movie titled The Exorcist in which Father Merrin is the titular exorcist, he doesn't perform an exorcism until the last quarter of the movie, and even then Merrin doesn't deliver. His grand duel with Satan ends with him dying of a heart attack off-camera, leaving only the odor of his evacuated bowels and wafts of "Tubular Bells" as evidence of such a showdown.

Thanks for all that unnecessary build-up, movie. You should've just named yourself The Expendable Guy.

Oh shit, we went there.

Why He Should Be Good At His Job:

He has telekinetic powers, can outrun a '69 Camaro, kick heroin in a day and deflect lasers using an even bigger laser... all while sporting the burliest beard this side of Kashyyyk.

He's Obi-Wan-Goddamn-Kenobi, and if it hadn't been for that Jedi vow of celibacy, he would've been all over more coed rump than butterfly tattoos.

Why He Sucked At It:

The entire Star Wars series is one long story of Obi-Wan falling asleep at the wheel. Despite all his vaunted Force and beard powers, Obi-Wan fails to prevent almost every major tragedy in the franchise's history.

Let's start with a critique of his precognitive Jedi mind tricks. In The Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan rightly calls that training Anakin Skywalker is a very bad idea. Even Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson concur, and when the most badass man and Muppet in the universe agree with you, you know damn well you're onto something.

Had Obi-Wan just Force-punted the brat from Jingle All The Way out a window right then and there, we would've been spared two films of Hayden Christensen (and treated to three new films of Han and Chewie: Intergalactic Party Cruisers). But no, he takes Anakin under his wing and adopts a million-man clone army along the way.

Oh, and did we mention that all the clones are of Jango Fett, the murderous bounty hunter who tried to kill Obi-Wan multiple times? Doesn't he notice that cloning the galaxy's deadliest hitman a bazillion times over is a totally Sithy thing to do?

Well, when Anakin and the clone army inevitably starting killing everybody, Obi-Wan finally gets his shit together long enough to lop 75 percent of Anakin's limbs off. And instead of ending the whiny Sith, Obi-Wan leaves.

He just fucking leaves the scene.

Come on, Obi-Wan, it's Darth Vader! He chopped up a hundred younglings just hours earlier! Also, it's not against the Jedi Code to mercy kill someone if he's slowly and painfully burning to death. Obi-Wan just trots off, leaving Vader wiggling around like a grilled Vienna sausage for the Emperor to find, repair and turn into a cybernetic James Earl Jones.

Obi-Wan's contingency plan is even more inept. When Darth Vader comes back to bite him in the ass, Obi-Wan picks the worst alias possible. Did he really think hiding as "Ben" Kenobi, the guy living down the road from Darth Vader's relatives on Darth's home planet of Tatooine was going to fool anyone?

We're not sure who's more incompetent: Obi-Wan (whose pseudonym included his last name) or the Empire (which--with its nigh unlimited resources--should've found Kenobi in 20 minutes, not 20 years).

This took too long.

So now that we've hit a new low and knocked the Jedi master who helped raise us down a peg, is there any cinematic heroes left who are above our rebuke?

Jehovah, Yahweh, The Alpha and the Omega. He also invented the Batmobile.

Why He Should Be Good At His Job:

He's God.

Why He Sucked At It:

God instructs Congressman Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) to build an ark so his family and neighbors can survive a horrific flood in their Beltway suburb. The cause of this deluge is a burst dam, which was shoddily built by corrupt Congressman Justin Long (John Goodman).

In the end, Evan learns the value of an A.R.K. (Act of Random Kindness), Long is exposed as a crook and Washington D.C. is ravaged by a tidal wave. Wait, what?

Look, we understand that the Lord works in mysterious ways. We also get that in the original Noah story, God punished mankind for devolving into a bunch of raging douchebags.

But in Evan Almighty, in the process of punishing only one (one) dude and teaching another guy to be a marginally better human being, God wreaks Hurricane Katrina, Jr. on a million or so Washingtonians.

Of course, Evan Almighty was a PG-rated family comedy, so we don't see any corpses. But seriously, you can't flash flood D.C., with its subway system and marshy topography, and expect everything to end up all sunshine and lollipops.

And even if you did save everyone using God Magic, did we need the collateral damage? Seeing as how the film contains such profound themes as "the environment is good" and "government waste is bad," it makes zero sense that God would engineer an ecological catastrophe that basically defunds FEMA for the next decade.

We forgive you for not making any you-damn sense, Lord. After all, Brick Tamland was created in your image.

"Thou shalt love lamp."

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For villains who were terrible at their jobs, check out The 6 Most Pointlessly Elaborate Movie Murder Plots. Or find out about some real people who sucked at their jobs, in 5 Horrifying Tales Of 911 Incompetence.

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