5 Villains Who Stopped Trying Mid-Movie

Iron Man is distracted right there! Turn his suit off!

Did he scour the internet for evil plan suggestions and pick the most sarcastic one?

When they finally "kill" Ultron, it's mentioned that Vision has blocked him from the web so he can't send his consciousness out. But during his town-floating rampage, he had access to countless storage spaces on which to upload a copy of himself. Saving your work is something a 60-year-old divorcee learns on their first day of typing class; one would imagine the smartest thing on the planet could manage that level of redundancy. For a guy who loved bragging about being everywhere and limitless, it seems like he's quite limited, and pretty much ... right there.

Why does a robot need to sit?

Second only to his "winning smile" powers.

Here's the problem: For the entirety of his film career, Loki forgets about his illusions the moment he's around someone who can kick his ass. Which is unfortunate, because with enough scheming and foresight -- you know, two traits he's supposed to have -- it's an all but unbeatable super power. Iron Man shoots a volley of rockets at Loki, but oh no! It wasn't actually Loki at all, but an innocent hot dog cart. Loki's really over there. Black Widow is on it: She combat leaps onto his face, only to realize seconds later that she's sexily wrapping her legs around a furious beehive. The point is that with half a brain, Loki could use his illusions to turn every battle against the Avengers into a series of hilarious Wile E. Coyote accidents.

To his credit, there was one brief moment in which Loki remembered he could conjure holograms, and it worked perfectly. Here is that brilliant move in its entirety:

"It's my brother, the master of illusions, suspiciously standing right in front of a prison cell! This is the perfect time for an all-or-nothing tackle!"

Loki could disguise himself as the president and sign an executive order for stricter bow and arrow control -- that takes care of like 15 percent of the Avengers right there. He could turn public opinion against the group by disguising himself as Jenny McCarthy and telling America's stupid that gamma rays cause autism. And if Hulk gets pissed off at that, at the very least, he could hide on the other side of the room instead of doing this:

Ruining a perfectly good floor in the process.

6,000 SFX shots, and not one clears up the plot.

Apologists might insist that he only wanted to kill inferior humans, and was therefore trying to take the X-Men alive -- but he had so many ways to do that, too. The movie showed him sinking people into the ground, trapping them in walls with his limitless sand powers, or -- and they made a big deal of this -- enslaving them with his mind. Where was that? If Apocalypse visited a local kindergarten and asked for foolproof ideas on how his powers could beat the X-Men, the children would all die of old age before they ran out of suggestions.

And are somehow more cartoonish.

In the film, our heroes beat Doomsday by having Wonder Woman hold him with her unbreakable lasso while Superman rams a kryptonite spear into his chest. It would be a great plan at any other time -- "Hold him down while I stab him" is a timeless classic -- but in the movie, Doomsday's face shoots lasers like crazy. Why wasn't he shooting Wonder Woman, Superman, and that stupid spear with lethal eye beams? Or hell, why was he even there? Did Spider-Man 3 teach us nothing about cramming too many villains into a movie?

If your face could do this, would you ever NOT be doing it?

Earlier in the movie, Doomsday's heat vision utterly wrecks Superman while he's both well-rested and specifically trying not to get wrecked by it. While he's dying, carrying a kryptonite spear, it probably would have carved him in half. I mean, look at the power of this goddamn Doomsday heat vision:

Doomsday is only 10 minutes old and instinctively knows to hate Ben Affleck.

And there he is playing tug-of-war with Wonder Woman, never once thinking: "HOW KILL WOMAN? OH YEAH, FACE SHOOT ATOMIC DEATH."

"Your only hope of escape is to get me to fall in love with you."
"... Go on."

Now remember, Dormammu is a dark dimension where time has no meaning. He hates time, and though he has complete mastery over Strange -- and slaughters him in like a dozen different ways across the loops -- Dormammu still gives in almost immediately. But with infinite time loops available to him, shouldn't Dormammu have tried taking the time gem? You know, the thing Dr. Strange SHOWED HIM AND BRAGGED ABOUT HAVING during one of the very first loops? Dormammu is like a parent dealing with a toddler who won't finish his dinner, only he starts his side of the argument with "My cosmic schemes have been undone! I curse you from the void, Refuser of Vegetables!" and then runs away forever.

When he's not writing articles, M.A.N. spends his time penning fiction novels and screenplays. You can check out his books, Blade Forged In Darkness and He Who Leads. You can also follow him on Twitter @WarWithWordsEFN, contact him at manwordsmith@gmail.com, and visit his site at http://www.warwithwords.com.

For more ways bad writing solved everything, read 5 Characters Who Ignore Powers That Solve All Their Problems and 6 Characters Who Forget They Have Powers That Solve The Plot.

And be sure to check out 9 Types Of Coworkers To Make You Want Your Head To Explode, and let us know about other headsplosion-worthy employees we may have missed.

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