We all know about the talking Bond villain who just needs to keep his damn mouth shut, or just needs to kill Bond the minute he has the opportunity. As Scott Evil so expertly pointed out.
What I’m more looking for in this thread is something incredibly simple that the villain had to do which would have assured his victory, but doesn’t fall into the above two categories.
My nomination is Katanga from Live And Let Die. He has Bond captured. He has his henchman (“Buterhook!”) take his watch from him, then quizzes Solitaire about the serial number on the back to see if her gifts have been comprimised. Then Butterhook knocks Bond unconcious and Katanga sends him to the swamp to get eaten by crocodiles or somesuch.
Here’s the incredibly stupid thing. After he reads the serial number off Bond’s watch, he…gives it back to him! Why would he give it back?! He’s just going to send him to his death!
If he had simply kept the watch, or thrown it out, Bond would not have been able to use it to <a> cut his ropes free while hanging above the shark tank, and more importantly <b> not been able to use the magnet to get the shark pellet, which he used to kill Katanga. (I was going to say he never would have gotten away from the crocodiles, but then I remembered he wasn’t able to get the boat b/c it was tied up).
So what are some other moronic Bond villain things that don’t fall into the revealing all his plans / killing him categories?
My vote goes to Scaramanga in the Man with the Golden Gun. He allows Bond a full clip in his Walther, while Scaramanga allows himself only one bullet. Bond ends up using his full clip, killing Scaramanga with the last bullet. If Scaramanga had demanded a level playing field, Bond would have been unarmed very early in the challenge.
Remember that Goldfinger did not tell most of his plan to Bond on purpose. Bond managed to sneak into the room under the Fort Knox model and eavesdrop as Goldfinger was describing his plan to all the syndicate heads who had provided the men and materials. Then Bond is caught, escorted out, and everyone else is gassed.
So what the hell was the point? Did Goldfinger build that whole room (the control panel, the moving pool table, the model of Fort Knox on hydraulic lifts) just to explain his scheme to people he knew would be dead thirty seconds later? I like the movie, but that’s a special kind of stupid right there.
Dr. No didn’t exactly qualify for brain surgeon status in his treatment of Bond after his capture on the beach. The “Let’s break him by placing him into this plush suite” plan is probably not going to be successful…
The remake Casino Royale was a great film, but the plot held water worse than a leaky sieve. Le Chiffre tried to make money by short selling stock. His method of driving down the stock price of the airplane company by driving a truck load of explosives into their new plane. This makes for a great chase scene, but why not write some malicious software for the plane’s autopilot or putting in some cracked turbine blades?
And let’s not forget, that his brilliant idea for making all that money back was to enter into a high stakes poker match, with an eye that bleeds every time he gets pocket aces.
Well, he was going for a big stock drop that had to be timed very well. He had to make the failure huge, public, and as messy as possible. The original plan might have been to smuggle an explosive on board or to hit it on the runway, doesn’t matter. The bombing would guarrantee a nasty stock fall on schedule. Minor or correctable flaws wouldn’t do the job: that could cost Le Chiffre everything if it simply didn’t work in time. And when Bond hit his first tool in Africa, he had to find another solution fast. You may claim plot holes, but this isn’t actually one of them.
Yes. The movie Goldfinger really was crazy, and he loved explaining his plans, especially to people who he knew couldn’t screw up his plans, because he was going to kill them. It wasn’t stupid, but it was crazy.
Goldfinger in the book wasn’t crazy – he was paymaster for the Russian spy services, and he really was going to rip off Fort Knox. But he wasn’t going to knock off his co-conspirators.
I still can’t figure out why Goldfinger (in either the book or the movie) let Bond live. In the book he used Bond as a secretary. In the movie it urns out that he can use Bond’s presence to hrlp keep the US government from invading his house – only there’s no way he could have known that at the beginning. I agree that Katanga acted stupidly in letting Bond live instead of killing him right away, but gloating and keeping Bond alive to kill him later is a characteristic of movieBond villains. (“You keep subverting my attempt to arrange a picturesque death for you,” grouses Drax in Moonraker.)
Can someone please explain to me the villain’s plan in Casino Royale?
I understand that he wanted the plane manufacturing/developing company to drop in stock value but I don’t understand how he’d make money off of that. I’ve loved this movie since I first saw it but after reading posts in this thread I realize that I’ve never understood how his plan worked and now I’m feeling stupid. >.<
Which is why the whole point of the thread excludes killing Bond right away. That’s why I clarified that in the title, first sentence, and last sentence of the OP.
Sometimes the stupid villains do is trying to kill Bond when there’s no need to. Like in Goldeneye where Bond is flying over the jungle searching for the villain’s secret base. He was just about to give it up as a wild goose chase when the bad guys try to shoot him down with a missile. Naturally he survives and now knows where they are.
The stupidest thing practically all the villains do is leave their women alone with Bond, sometimes to seduce him for information, sometimes to kill him, sometimes it seems just to act as hostesses. But he always turn them.
Another stupid thing is to set some robotic Rube Goldberg machine to the task of killing bond. How expensive is a series of mobile laser cannons in a surgical suite compared to a bullet?
Third, they don’t give their armies of henchmen enough firearms training. They can never hit anything with a gun.
Also, their security is terrible. It seems everyone “on the street” knows where the secret hideout is. Maybe this isn’t so important, since Bond will get it out of the villain’s girlfriend anyway.
Did they know he was just about to give up? When you’re in an aeroplane, it’s a bit difficult to read your intentions until you actually turn the plane around to head home.
I seem to recall that the movie had Bond trying to escape the labyrinth by climbing down the scaffolding that it was set up on, but his gun fell down several hundred feet making a lot of noise. He couldn’t retrieve it, so instead used Scaramanga’s hubris in having a wax Bond with a working gun as a regular fixture in the labyrinth, which wax figure Bond took the place of, took the gun and then just shot Scaramanga when Scaramanga walked past, thinking it was still the wax dummy of Bond. I thought this was the best comeuppance in any Bond film ever.
This is an important thing to learn, even if it takes a little while to get your head around.
A makes a contract with C to “borrow” 100 shares of Airline Company Ltd. from C, with the promise that he will return 100 shares of Airline Company Ltd. next week.
A immediately sells those 100 shares of Airline Company Ltd. to B, for 50$ a share (what they are currently going for at the stock exchange). A now has 5000$ in his pocket, but also has an obligation to give 100 shares back to C within the week.
So A then hopes that the share price at the stock exchange of Airline Company Ltd. will drop (or he engineers the drop, a la evil villain style) within the week.
If the share price does drop, to say 5$ a share, he can cheaply buy back the 100 shares that he promised to pay back to C, and pay them back to C, and it only costs him 500$. He gets to keep the remaining 4500$ profit.
And there is almost always some convenient area close by where the hideout can be easily observed, its guards counted, etc., with trees or something to hide in. This has been taken to an extreme in Burn Notice, where the observation area not only is close and has convenient trees, but they always are able to drive a car right up to it.
Why wouldn’t he give it back? he’s not some common mugger who kills people to take their watches. And he doesn’t know its a special watch and doesn’t see any danger in giving it back. That’s the entire point of disguising gadgets as ordinary objects.
“You expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die”
He is in fact just about to kill Bond. Then Bond manages to convince him that Bond has information worth keeping him alive for. It’s all in the scene.