5 Movie Villains With Really Stupid Master Plans

Or a crossbow. Seriously, just a bolt to the wordhole, while singing "I'm the Queen, that makes this legal!" Boom, done.

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.

Yeah, that's pretty much our reaction too.

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.

"My God, the door is locked? We never trained for this!"

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.

"Oh, yeah. I probably should have emailed HR about those two ... Eh, whatever."

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.

"I only wanted to do a final tribute to Fredo."

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.

Instead of watching Part III, imagine the rest of this playing out like 12 Monkeys.

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:

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.

"So, do I like tip you? This is my first time."

... 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.

"How dare you betray me while I'm betraying you!?!"

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.

"That jingling is just change. Lots of tolls on the way here."