I have one semi-serious rebuttal re evil CEOs: Hank Scorpio (“The Simpsons” - You Only Move Twice). Did anyone NOT want to sign up with him and his organization?
I nominate Dick Jones, the CEO of Omni Consumer Products.
Omni was so evil, it managed to stay evil in the sequels!
It depends on what you want. There’s a curve of relatable evil going from the eight foot tall intergalactic warlord sitting on a throne of skulls to that bitch on the HOA board who has it out for you. The first one is fun escapism, but the last one you know as the true evil that keeps you up at night.
Toecutter from Mad Max is a pretty lame villain, IMO. His gang as a whole was gang-y, but they’da been trounced by even the Orphans if they were in The Warriors New York. They’da had to live in the sewers like chuds in The Duke’s New York.
I read the OP as bad as in incompetent bad guys.
That coyote character can’t get anything going his way in trying to catch the roadrunner.
For a different type of villain, Roy Batty from Blade Runner was interesting–crushes his “father’s” skull with his hands, but then lets Dekkard live at the end.
Well, Batty’s fight was never with Deckard. True, Deckard’s fight was with replicants, and Batty was a replicant, but Batty was there seeking answers/vengeance from his maker/father. Once he accomplished that, he really had no further goals other than to survive. And when he realized and accepted that his survival was not just pre-ordained to fail but to fail imminently, he had no reason to kill Deckard.
I definitely concur that he was an interesting, complex and utterly three-dimensional villain.
But, if vengeance is a factor with Batty with his maker, I’d think he’d also be pissed at Deckard for killing snake lady and Pris, and directly contributing to Leon’s death.
I do like that Batty’s complex, especially at the end:
Much better than the “Wilhelm Scream” that is a lot of villains’ last utterance.
YouTube video of the Roy Batty death scene, for those maybe not familiar with it:
True, but by showing mercy he finally achieved the humanity he sought, if only for a moment before he died.
Batty may have been the film’s antagonist, but he was no villain.
That’s one way to look at it, but I had more in mind the idea of “bad guys, either singularly or as a group, who you consider lame for one reason or another.”
And yet they managed to unleash Dark Willow upon the world.
Which I think is/was the larger point : it doesn’t matter how grand the scale of evil, petty evil is still evil and has consequences on those being eviled upon.
The series Damages had a number of casting problems, as they kept putting comedians into dramatic rolls, i.e., Martin Short, Lilly Tomlin, etc. The worst was casting Darrell Hammond as a steely-eyed hit man call The Deacon. Are you frightened yet? I kept seeing him as Bill Clinton, no matter how hard he tried not to be.
That was the comedic genius of the episode. Homer was a redshirt for an evil-genius boss who was a genuinely likeable guy, who valued Homer’s contributions to the organization and who provided generously for his minions. Never been done before or since, I think.
Well said. The typical unstoppable badass of a villain would’ve killed Deckard without a moment’s thought. Batty, though, gained redemption at the end.
I give him points for having an attainable goal 
In the original novel of Goldfinger, Goldfinger wasn’t going to blow up Fort Knox, he was going to steal all the gold. The movie, to its credit, lampshaded this by having Bond point out how totally unfeasible such a plan would be.
I also kinda like that one Bond movie where the bad guy was a media magnate who was trying to start a war between the US & China because it would be a huge boost to his business. The sillyness with the stealth boat almost ruins it, but that guy was such an arrogant ass, that his death at the end ranks as one of the most satisfying movie villain demises I can remember.
But Dark Willow was unleashed entirely by accident. Which makes the Bad Guy even more lame. Warren was aiming at Buffy when he shot Tara. He couldn’t even kill the right person. That makes him a very bad bad guy. By then Andrew and Jonathan were on the run from Darth Rosenberg.
M Emmett Walsh’s character in Blood Simple.
…Leroy Brown.
Duh.
From Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, we go through a fairly exciting romp only to find:
the evil genius has been dead for decades, and everything was simply automated.
That was dissatisfying and a dull ending.
Well…
I thought it was a useless plan. People NEED water. If he tries to sell it for too much, farming (or whatever is left up there), along with the people living there, will move. Then the market for overpriced water will, heh heh, dry up. Or, people will just steal it. Or the government will come in and nationalize you, wiping out your best laid plan.
That was intentional, as they were just there to set off the real big bad of the season.