5 Movie Villains You Never Realized Were Really Incompetent

5

Stop Flying So Close To Giant Monsters

If there's one thing we know about King Kong, it's that he hates aircraft. Virtually every movie depiction of Mr. Kong includes a scene wherein he smacks a flying machine right out of the sky. His most recent adventure, Kong: Skull Island, found all sorts of ways for the super-sized simian to battle helicopters, despite being set about a thousand miles from the nearest airport.

Kong wrecks helicopters so thoroughly that Samuel L. Jackson's character is inspired to go on the warpath for twisted vengeance. But wouldn't it have been easier to pull back on those joysticks a bit? Kong is huge, but the damn monkey can't actually fly. Yet for some ridiculous reason, these battle-tested veterans decide to maneuver their helicopters like X-Wings flying through the Death Star trench. They fly so close to Kong that they could chuck rocks if they run out of ammo.

Seriously, what is their strategy, beyond creating cool visuals? Are they worried they won't be able to line up a shot? Because Kong is 104 feet tall and their guns have an effective firing range of up to 1,200 yards when trying to hit a human. They don't have to get within swatting distance to do some damage. Any King Kong movie should realistically end with Kong dying in a hail of gunfire from offscreen vehicles. And it's even worse in movies with modern technology. In Pacific Rim and Cloverfield, the Air Force attacks land-bound aliens with modern fighter jets by flying between the monsters' goddamn legs.

That's about a step away from the Air Force strapping an F-14 onto the back of a pickup truck and driving at them. In modern dogfights, the weaponry has such long range that planes typically never even see each other. Yet when a monster the size of the Golden Gate Bridge appears, the Air Force's highest priority is to get an aerial view of the thing's taint.

4

I Am Legend's Mutants Could Just Wear Hoodies

In I Am Legend, Will Smith's Robert Neville survives because the virus-mutated feral people living in New York City are unable to expose themselves to direct sunlight. So during the day, Neville is free to walk around outside. The monsters seem stupid and cruel, but they're smart enough to realize that the sun boils their skin.

But then we learn that the mutants are intelligent, because they use a lure and a snare trap to catch and knock out Neville. The mutants can't grab him right away because it's still daytime, but as the sun goes down, a mutant and his infected dogs approach while using shadows for cover.

3

Why Is Every Gate In Jurassic World Big Enough For The Biggest Dinosaur?

You're a hip young InGen executive looking for a way to capitalize on your company's ability to build dinosaurs. You've heard the horror stories about the original Jurassic Park, but you're also reasonably sure that a zoo populated with live dinosaurs would generate enough money to create a life-sized Cocainosaurus. You're not dumb, so you take countless safety precautions to ensure there won't be another disaster. You hire tons of staff, beef up security with cutting-edge technology, and build enormous gates in all of the dino enclosures so that the dinosaurs won't even have to duck when they step through to maul everybody.

2

The Murder "Plan" In The Fugitive Was The Stupidest One Possible

Say you want to murder someone as part of a conspiracy to suppress knowledge of the nasty side effects of a drug. Again. This happens to you with surprising frequency, doesn't it? Anyway, this time you need it to be completely untraceable, like when you ran someone off the road. You know your target's happily married and reasonably fit, so how about sending a one-armed dude to enter the victim's house while his wife is home? Fucking nailed it.

Virtually every facet of the plan to kill Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive is moronic. First, the assassin they send, Sykes, objectively sucks. Which makes sense, because he only has one goddamn arm. Sykes can only baaarely murder Dr. Kimble's wife after a protracted struggle.

1

Baby Driver's Criminal Mastermind Violates His Own Rule For No Good Reason

Doc, the brilliant criminal kingpin in Baby Driver, has one rule: Never use the same team twice. That keeps crew members from getting too comfortable with each other and joining up against him, or from getting on each others' nerves and blowing things. The only exception is Baby, because he drives like a badass, is in Doc's debt, and is a gangly kid with tinnitus who doesn't exactly scream "physical threat."

Doc has implicitly lived and survived by this rule for years, and he fanatically sticks to it ... until the third heist of the film. For the biggest job in the movie, Doc changes one guy, but otherwise the crew is identical to the one used for the opening bank job. All he did was swap out Jon Bernthal's character, who has issues with Baby, with a maniacal Jamie Foxx, who ... has issues with Baby. Was that supposed to make some dramatic difference? He also kept the two Bonnie and Clyde-esque criminal lovers. Shockingly, that backfires!