Not brilliant, just not stupid. Any halfway-competent evil genius should know better than to wait until the hero arrives to kick off the diabolical plan - the fact that most villains don’t do this just means that most villains are fumbling idiots, not that Ozy was terribly brilliant.
The plot in Live and Let Die’s not all that bad. Again, the movie not the book.
Open spoiler to follow but hell the movie’s 30 yrs old.
You could, theoretically, if you ran an island, have enough heroin growing that you could give it away free, multiply exponentially the number of junkies AND bankrupt the rest of the players in the black market… then once the rest are basically out of business jack up the price.
In the G.I.Joe comic, Cobra Commander stages an assault on the Pitt not to destroy all the Joes or anything like that but to prove that his stealth technology works so he can sell it. That’s pretty diabolical and clever.
And if you want to waste the afternoon, head over and check out Xanatos Gambit.
Irradiating Fort Knox so Americas entire gold reserve is useless thereby increasing the value of Goldfingers supply was certainly the best plan any Bond villain ever came up with.
Yeah, every first world nation would just look the other way I guess.
There were undeniably a lot of questionable ideas in Wanted, but using a fanatical order of expert assassins to murder people while collecting hefty fees on the side was pretty brilliant.
In Die Hard 3,
Simon’s massive heist, disguising it as just an obsessed man’s attempt to get back at the man who killed his brother.
Cartman fooling Scott Tenorman into eating his own parents. It’s funny, but I’m serious. It’s diabolical.
Cartman knows that Stan and Kyle would betray him so he cooks up a lame revenge plan with a farmer and a pony that won’t work, but he’s playing Stan and Kyle. They warn Scott, who sends his parents in his stead. But Cartman planned for that, and told the farmer that two people were coming to kill the pony. The farmer kills both tresspassers, Cartman steals the bodies, makes chili with the meat and then feeds Scott the “Tenorman chili” in front of the whole town at the chili cookoff that Cartman had planned before Scott’s parents were even shot.
It’s the fact that, even though he didn’t seem so, Cartman was two steps ahead of everybody else that makes the revenge so diabolically clever.
i nearly lost my mind when i saw that episode.
And then Cartman drinks his tears, LOL!
Elaborating on the The Usual Suspects quote here, for those who haven’t seen it:
Someone is talking about an evil criminal and to illustrate how utterly ruthless this guy is, recounts what happened when some other gangsters tried to intimidate him, back when he wasn’t so infamous. They captured his wife and kids and held them in front of the guy, knives at their throats, saying they’ll kill his loved ones. Instead of caving in, he killed his own family himself, then went on to kill the families and friends of those who tried to intimidate him. He bacome an almost mythical figure, and the above quote about the devil is used in this description.
I’m not sure that’s such a great idea. Kananga’s plan is to give away heroin that he could be selling. He’s forgoing a huge amount of income to drive his competitors out of business and increase the size of the market. Presumably he thinks that once he has a monopoly, he’ll be able to sell it for more than the current going rate and make back more than the cost of what he gave away.
But I’m not sure a monopoly in heroin distribution would be so lucrative. Some businesses cost a small fortune to start up. If you have a monopoly in one of those businesses, you can charge high prices without fear that new companies will out-compete you. I’m not sure that smuggling and distributing heroin has such startup costs to deter competitors. They’d start small, of course, but could undercut Kananga’s price grow their business.
Colonel Landa in Inglourious Basterds:
Allowing the genocide of several hundred countrymen, as well as of the top four members of the Nazi government, essentially single-handedly ending the war and betraying his country, all so he can get a full pardon and some real estate in Nantucket. I mean, wow.
To elaborate further, the person who was telling this story worked for this person, though he’s never met him. The cops were drilling this guy for information, but he wouldn’t give anything up about his boss, telling the above story and saying how terrified he was of this person. The cop when on to say that those stories are fake, designed to mess with your head and keep you scared, in fact, the cop suggested that this person probably doesn’t even exist to which he replied “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” The line really pulls the whole movie together.
But not clever. Gassing people to death is pretty well-established as a method. Slamming their head down onto a raised pencil, not so much.
He also got Scott’s favorite band to arive just in time to watch Scott start crying, and then calling him an uncool crybaby.
Maybe not up to The Usual Suspects for sheer terror, but you have to admire Michael Coreleone in The Godfather. After Vito swears that he won’t take vengence on those who killed Sonny and Michael’s Sicilian wife, Vito’s death leaves Michael in charge. Michael pretends to lose interest in the family business, giving Tessio an opportunity to betray him, then gets Carlo to admit the Barzini family killed Sonny. Michael then has Carlo, Tessio, the Barzinis (and for good measure, the Tataglias) all whacked, eliminating his rivals and becoming more powerful than his father ever was.
How about, when death is on the line, tricking the hero into going into a battle of wits knowing that, as a non-Sicilian, he doesn’t have a chance.
Yeah, and how’d that work out for him?
Smuggling heroin out of Vietnam in U.S. servicemen’s coffins was pretty clever.
It’s been on my mind a lot since I mentioned it in another thread- the end of Start Of Darkness. Specifically, Xykon’s method of ensuring that Redcloak will never be able to betray him.
Step 1. Allow the tensions between Redcloak and Right-Eye to grow, until the point where they feel the need to take things into their own hands.
Step 2. Create a defense against Right-Eye’s magical weapon, but don’t let on that you know he’s trying to assasinate you.
Step 3. Don’t let Redcloak know you know, either.
Step 4. Watch, smirking, as Redcloak tries to save you by killing his brother.
5. Now Redcloak can never even think of leaving Xykon, because that would mean he killed his brother for no good reason. To make sure he’s completely broken, force him to raise Right-Eye as a zombie.
Speculative fiction has a an abundance of twisted monsters, but the above is the most sickening to me. The preface to SoD says that Rich Burlew didn’t want Xykon to come off as even a little sympathetic, and he certaintly succeeds.