5 Famous Movie Villains With Shockingly Stupid Master Plans

Also, if Snow White's "eternal sleep" kept her beautiful, then how would that even solve the Queen's problem? The Queen isn't angry because Snow White is taking all her boyfriends, she's angry that Snow White exists. It would be like if you murdered someone you couldn't stand the sight of, then embalmed them and propped them up so they'd always be visible in your bathroom mirror.

After RoboCop disobeys orders and busts his own police chief for corruption, Mattox remotely shuts him down and moves him back to the OmniCorp lab. Sellars decides that he can make more money by pretending RoboCop went down in the line of duty, so he orders Mattox to kill him. Mattox tells two low-ranking guards to do the deed, because apparently the working environment at OmniCorp isn't big on personal responsibility. We see exactly how low-level these chumps are when they show up at the lab and find out they don't have security clearance to walk through the door.

MGM

The scientists in the lab reactivate RoboCop, who immediately incapacitates the two hapless guards and proceeds to carve a swath of destruction through OmniCorp HQ that ends with him putting a bullet in Sellars. An evil businessman has once again been foiled by his only weakness: violence.

We don't blame Mattox for making someone else do his job -- we have interns feed us grapes while we dictate articles to them, so we're in no position to judge. But he needed to send someone who had access to RoboCop. The damn janitors probably had a better security clearance than those schmucks did. It's even more baffling when you remember that the movie's very first scene showed us that OmniCorp has the ability to designate anyone as a "Red Asset" that RoboCop's programming won't allow him to shoot. That means the guys who were sent to kill RoboCop were inexplicably not designated as being invincible against RoboCop, the only person who could stop them. And who has control over who gets to be a Red Asset? None other than Mattox, as he demonstrates when he finally confronts RoboCop himself.

MGM

RoboCop's buddy stops Mattox, and RoboCop later manages to override his programming and kill Sellars because something something the power of love. But none of that would have happened if they hadn't sent the two least-qualified goons in history to stop a robotic killing machine. Maybe they had terrible performance reviews, and OmniCorp simply has a very aggressive termination policy.

... except for one murder in The Godfather Part II, when everyone involved decides to launch the worst plan possible, for no apparent reason.

Paramount Pictures

When compared to some of the more elaborate murders in the franchise, Michael's hit on the treacherous Hyman Roth is almost disappointingly simple. A guy just walks up to the heavily-escorted Roth in an airport and shoots him point blank. It's a suicide mission, and is treated as such by the assassin, who barely makes any attempt to get away before he's turned into a human bullet catalog by the police.

Paramount Pictures

To be fair, the movie does explain why the plan is so dumb and suicidal: it's the only shot they'll have at Roth in between when his plane lands and when he's put into highly secure police custody. However, it doesn't explain why they decided to send Rocco Lampone for the so-simple-an-armed-monkey-could-do-it hit. If for some reason you haven't committed the entire Corleone family to memory, here's a handy chart:

Paramount Pictures

You'll notice that Rocco's a high-ranking caporegime, and of the guys who are at the same rank or higher, two aren't trusted and the third is being phased out. In essence, Michael is sending his most valuable right-hand man on an obvious suicide mission that any of his expendable soldiers could have easily done. It's like Obama sending Joe Biden on a kamikaze mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. Sure, he could probably get it done -- there's a ton of crazy in Joe's eyes that says "murder is an old friend to me" -- but then you gotta explain to Congress why the Vice President died driving a flaming dump truck through the Bin Laden compound when Seal Team Six was sitting around playing dominoes.

... at which point Father reveals that the whole thing was a trap to get both Preston and the resistance. How clever, how sinister -- how can you compete with such an evil mind?! Preston has no choice but to, uh, pull out his guns and murder everyone in the entire building, including Father, because none of the Clerics who escorted and later ambushed him thought to frisk him for guns at the same time he handed over that sword.

Dimension Films

And it's not like he was being stealthy. As the next scene shows, Preston brought not only two guns, but also two arm-length metal holsters and four bulky ammo clips, meaning the most basic pat-down or even a metal detector would have stopped him. Preston wouldn't have been allowed into City Hall to contest a parking ticket like that, but somehow he gets an audience with the supreme ruler who, remember, knows Preston wants to kill him.

So the bad guys get mowed down in a ridiculously one-sided shootout, the evil empire is overthrown, and society is liberated. All of which could have been avoided had the emotionless, logical, remorseless Clerics thought to ask the gun kata expert if he had any guns on him.

Dimension Films

Keep in mind that this movie takes place completely in the future, so there's no "only one robot can be sent back" time travel etiquette. There's no reason Skynet couldn't kill Connor by literally burying him in robots. We even see another Terminator in the very same scene that's preoccupied with trying to murder Ensign Chekov and a little girl, instead of, say, the most important target in the entire war.

But why did Skynet bother with the whole bait-and-switch when it managed to get a Terminator right next to John much earlier in the movie? Remember, John only went to the factory on the advice of a Terminator who thought it was human. If Skynet can make a Terminator pass for a trustworthy human, why not just have one kill John as soon as it gets close enough? If you're thinking the only reason it got so close in the first is because it had no active intention of killing Connor, sure. That's a point. So put a Terminator next to Connor that makes killer "your mom" jokes, put a fucking bomb in its chest, and make it trigger on high-fives.

Warner Bros.

For more head-scratching plans, check out 6 Terrible Plans in Movies That Just Sort of Work Out and 6 Evil Corporations in Movies (With Terrible Business Plans).