7 Classic Star Wars Characters Who Totally Dropped the Ball

Preferably one that doesn't look like a vampire penis.

First of all, Jabba holds two high-profile prisoners but never demands a ransom of any kind, and in fact refuses money when it is offered to him. Unless he funds his operation with bounced checks and jellybeans, this is counterproductive. Keeping the prisoners brings the Jedi heat to his palace, which in turn leads to the worst decision Jabba makes in the film: refusing Luke's offer.

Surprisingly poor strategist.

Luke tells Jabba up front that if the prisoners aren't released, he will kill everything that moves and take them anyway. A Rancor and a porcine guard later, this offer is generously repeated, at a point where it is now clear that Luke is not just some dumbass in a stolen Jedi robe. But again, Jabba opts for the prideful route, which makes us wonder how he ever managed to succeed in organized crime in the first place.

About seven minutes later, every member of Jabba's operation has either been exploded, stabbed, shot, strangled or tossed into a giant sand vagina. Clearly he was never meant to manage a Domino's Pizza let alone hold the reigns of an underworld empire.

Snitches get stitches. Also, we strangle them.

See above. Chewie is an alien monster roughly the size of a doorframe with murderous rage tap-dancing around in his brain. We're surprised he didn't just start bludgeoning Lando to death with his manacles as soon as the Imperial guards were dispatched.

Leia is about a remark away from telling Chewie to snap Lando's head off like a Pez dispenser when he finally manages to gurgle out his plan to save Han. Had Lando simply gone over this before unchaining Chewbacca's giant meathooks, the "throttling" faux pas could've been avoided.

And that's a crucial point, because while Chewie chose the slow strangling method, perhaps because he wanted to see Lando's eyes pop out of his skull like one of those rubber squeeze toys, we know that he could just as easily have knocked Lando's head off his shoulders like a toddler smacking a baseball off a tee.

Lando's trilogy-saving explanation would have been left gurgling from a ragged neck stump.

Leia has seen the Death Star blow up her home planet like Bruce Vilanch in a microwave, so she knows the thing is no joke.

Somewhere down there, Jimmy Smits is burning to death.

And we know she's got some serious steel because with her entire planet under threat, she lies with a straight face about where the Rebellion is. So why in the Dooku does she leave the Empire a trail of space breadcrumbs to the only home she has left in the galaxy?

Or couldn't she have called ahead to let them know the Imperial fleet was on its way with their giant murder ball? At the very least, Leia could've had her underlings turn off all the lights in the base and pretend like no one was home. As it stands, the Rebels emerge victorious, but we have to believe that if Leia hadn't led the enemy directly to them, more than two pilots might have survived the assault.

His fat, sweaty blood is on your hands, Princess.

Anybody not killed by flaming debris from the planet-slaughtering explosion will quickly freeze to death or suffocate in the sudden lack of atmosphere, and any ships that manage to escape would be vaporized by the Death Star. This is a fantastic plan and it would've brought the house down like Whitesnake.

Seeing as how no one in the Star Wars universe ever succumbs to making sense, Tarkin instead elects to throw the parking brake on the Death Star and just wait for the moon to come to him, which would've been a good idea if A) the Rebels didn't already know he was coming, and B) space was a jungle and the Death Star was Rambo.

This decision ultimately results in his death, the destruction of the Death Star and a massive Imperial Job Fair due to the sudden loss of about 500,000 employees.

"We feel it's only fair to tell you that you may be exploded by lasers."

Priority: 1

Instead the crucial shield generator is stashed behind one locked door on a moon full of hostile natives, inside a small building that seems like it could have been pretty easily bombed from orbit by the rebels (and the shield generator's shields didn't protect the generator itself, obviously).

It didn't help that to support the absolutely vital shield generator protecting their superweapon, the Empire decides against building anything that resembles, say, infrastructure or a road, instead asking their crack troops to weave through a maze of redwoods at 200 miles per hour on the backs of oversized divining rods. It's like outfitting loggers in the Pacific Northwest with Kawasaki Ninjas.

Also, Ewoks.

Stolen parcels of data do not register as life forms.

Forget about the droids for a moment; assuming Vader has seen at least one episode of Miami Vice, you would think he'd be aware that the first thing people do during a raid is dump the evidence, be it flushing cocaine down a toilet or tossing sensitive information into an escape pod and kicking it the fuck into space (knowing it could be recovered later when it crash lands on the planet below).

OK, so maybe the Empire figured if that was the plan, at worst they could go down and retrieve the files themselves from the pod. But then we have the droid problem.

The shiny, gay problem

Saying the pod has no life forms is an utterly meaningless statement in a universe where sentient droids are as common as cell phones are on Earth. It'd be like declaring that a criminal couldn't possibly contact his accomplice because you didn't see him put any letters in his mailbox.

So why were there not standing orders to obliterate or intercept anything that launched out of the captured ship? Hell, with the technology they had in that galaxy, the pod itself could have been programmed with a thinking brain, with its own agenda to transport the plans and fuck the Empire.

This baffling error in judgment brings the two droids to Luke, who takes them to Obi-Wan, who teaches Luke to be a Jedi and leads him to Yoda, who trains Luke to be a master, which gives him the power to defeat Darth Vader and bring him back to the Light Side of the Force, which leads to the death of the Emperor and the fall of the Empire.

Hopefully somebody lost their job over that one.

For more baffling decisions, check tou The 5 Most Needlessly Complex Terror Plots in Film History.

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