I was watching The Losers tonight and Jason Patric played Max the evil villain. Now, okay, I accept that this is an action thriller and it’s not going to be realistic. But this guy’s evil was too overboard.
In order to demonstrate his bad-assness he was constantly killing people throughout the movie. Most of which were people working for him.
There was a scene were he had his secretary following him around on a beach holding an umbrella over his head to keep the sun out of his eyes. The wind came up and took the umbrella out of her control for a second. He was annoyed about getting the sun in his eyes so he killed her.
After the heroes attacked him the first time, he decided to form a special attack team to kill them. So he hired eightteen mercenaries. Then he changed his mind and decided to kill the heroes in a different way. So he had all the mercenaries killed because they were now a loose end.
There were numerous other people that he killed because they were in the way or they knew too much or they were no longer useful to him or they had failed him, etc.
But my thought was “How does he keep finding people to work for him?”
“Hi, I’m here to interview for the job.”
“Well, your application looks good. All you have to do is follow the boss around and hold an umbrella over his head.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“You better hope so.”
“What do you mean?”
“The boss is a little short tempered. If you make a mistake, he’ll kill you.”
“What!?!”
“If you make one single mistake, he’ll shoot you in the head with his gun. We must go through twenty or thirty umbrella holders a year. Now can you start tomorrow?”
“Ummm…actually I’ve decided I’d rather stay with my current position.”
Darth/Emperor Krayt from the Star Wars: Legacy comics planned to slowly kill off all the Mon Calamari. First he was going to kill off 1/10 of the population on the planet, round up the rest in the galaxy, and kill them off in work camps.
The reason he did this was a couple Mon Cals dared to oppose him.
Yeah, and you know what? Then it gets less convincing because it’s so obvious the writers are trying to sell him to you as a really, really bad guy. Look at him. He’s so bad! He’s so evil. LOOK DIDN’T YOU SEE HE ATE A PUPPY. This was one of my many many MANY criticisms of Avatar - they made the bad guy so over the top bad it was ridiculous, right up to hitting a cripple.
After a while you just roll your eyes and stop buying it.
I suppose it depends on how cynical you are about humanity. Hitting - or killing - cripples and rounding up enemies into camps where they will be gassed and converting them into such things as leather products is over the top evil. It’s also the sort of thing that real world humans have done to other humans, much less blue aliens. Eating a puppy? Not as bad as that old time king who fed a man he didn’t like that man’s son. Given the way humans have acted historically if anything I think Avatar was being too generous to the human side. I’ve certainly heard plenty of real world humans talk about how much they’d like to see a genocide of the Na’vi.
Personally, I think it’s impossible to come up with an evil so extreme that you couldn’t find millions of people enthusiastically willing to do it. There really isn’t any level of evil that can override my suspension of disbelief. Evil that’s too effective can, but not the mere existence of evil.
I always hate this – Ernst Stavro Blofeld did it, too. So did The Joker in his 1970s comic book incarnation and in the recent film The Dark Knight. And Darth Vader tried to solve his company motivation problems by killing off the incompetents in the last two films of the initial trilogy (he woulda killed more if Moff Tarkin hadn’t been reining him in in the original film).
I always find this hard to buy. You’d think that applications for “henchman” would start to dry up after word got out about the boss’ retirement package.
The first rule of big metal robot knife fighting is you do not talk about big metal robot knife fighting.
Eh, Vader killed a handful of underlings (out of millions of Imperial soldiers) on a top secret space station that was blown up by the rebels a few days later. The Star Wars universe is so vast that I don’t believe anything is universally known.
I have to agree with those who say that fictional villains are depressing similar to real villains. Stalin, if I recall correctly, eventually killed every single member of his original inner circle and exterminated entire regions of the Soviet Union merely because he had a a better idea for how that land should be used in his grand economic scheme. Hitler once had an entire city in Czechoslovakia wiped off the map because a single German officer was shot by one of the inhabitants. Robespierre took great pleasure in physically and mentally torturing innocent people. So, when you really think about it, nothing that Darth Vader did is psychologically unrealistic.
What I really dislike finding in fiction is a villain whose villainy is out of place, as for instance Terry Goodkind’s novel where the medieval ruler implements communist policies and has a staff of female torturers dressed in skintight black leather.
The fact that Quaritch wasn’t treating Jake like a child because of his injuries is one of his positive attributes. He saw Jake as another marine like himself, and reacted to Jake’s perceived betrayal the same way he would with anyone else.
Being honest about the fact that using tear gas on people still isn’t very humane doesn’t make him evil.
It’s one thing to kill your enemies or anyone who might become an enemy. But when you start killing everyone, then everyone is your enemy.
There’s an old Chinese story about an emperor who wants to make China perfect. So he writes up a list of everything that people can do wrong and makes them all crimes. And to make sure that people follow the law, he makes death the punishment for every crime. Kill somebody? Death penalty. Rob somebody? Death penalty. Spit on the sidewalk? Death penalty.
This army of soldiers out in the country is ordered to march back to the capital and report in one week. They start marching but there’s a torrential rainstorm and the roads all turn to mud and slow them down.
The general calls his second-in-command over.
“What’s the official penalty for an army reporting in late?”
“Every man in the army is killed.”
“What’s the official penalty for an army that declares itself revolutionaries and marchs on the capital to overthrow the Emperor?”
“Every man in the army is killed.”
“Well, we’re already late.”
Villains who kill their own henchmen always take me out of a movie. I had a hard time with The Dark Knight after the opening sequence. If your schemes depend on a large number of people putting themselves at risk and following complex instructions, you’d think you’d make it very clear that they weren’t going to be killed the moment they became superfluous. If nothing else, you might use them in your next scheme.
I have no problem with utterly depraved villains. Real life abounds with examples. But even the most depraved villain has to motivate and charm his underlings.
Movie Joker is sort of an exception to this, as he wasn’t motivated by the usual things. Given his actions in the rest of the movie, I expect he was trying to prove to himself that he could manipulate his henchmen that way; it would fit his nihilistic worldview.
I prefer the explanation from “Robot Chicken”: Jobs with the Empire’s fleets are awesome. Darth Vader is great with his lightsaber, but he’s delusional because he thinks that his Force Choke actually works. It doesn’t actually choke you, though. Preferring fake death and keeping a sweet job to real death-by-lightsaber, new recruits are trained in how to pretend to be Force Choked, then given cheap disguises (like a fake mustache/bad accent) to go unnoticed as a “new guy.”
But the henchman during the bank robbery did know or at least figure it out. Once one guy broke into the safe, the guy behind him exectuted him, then even made the point of saying something along the lines of:
“Boss told me to kill him, just like he probably told you to kill me!”
“Huh? I’m suppose to t kill the bus driver.”
“What bus driver?”
But part of the Joker’s point was to underscore a basic everyman-for-himself kind of thing. The guys further back in the chain who had figured out that they’d be killed once they completed their part of the the heist, still took part in the robbery because they were greedy and figured they could still make it out on top if they knew to expect a double-cross.
Der Trihs, I kind of suspect that you’d find any act of evil believable so long as it was committed by Republicans.
I remember being shocked that I was the only person in my 10th grade English class who thought it was immoral that
(Ender’s Game spoiler)
[spoiler]Ender killed the Buggers
Everyone else in my class was all “Yeah, but he thought they were going to attack the Earth!” and I was like “So? It’s freaking genocide.”[/spoiler]
We ended up having a big argument about it in the middle of class.
That just doesn’t make any sense. They’d be so hung up on making it out of the heist alive that they couldn’t do their jobs properly. Probably they’d all murder each other in the warehouse (or wherever they met up) before they left to do the job. And the Joker would run into the same problem Al Qaeda’s run into: If all your competent henchmen are killed in the first big job, you’ve got no one but mentally ill incompetents for the next jobs.
If you’ve ever dealt with very mentally ill people, it’s a chore to get them to do the simplest tasks, let alone carry out a complex plan involving 18-wheelers, automatic weapons, and precisely timed double crosses.
I realize The Dark Knight is a comic book movie and that endless streams of disposable henchmen are a comic book trope–Brilliantly parodied on the Venture Brothers–and I’m probably taking it too seriously. But it still bugged me.
The Joker is one of the few characters from which I can tolerate this actually, because he’s supposed to be highly irrational. He doesn’t really care if he screws up his own scheme because he just felt like killing off his henchmen or whatever. Whereas most villains who do this do seem to mostly care about their plan succeeding, and they’re just too stupid apparently to realize that killing their henchmen is counterproductive.
