Hmmm.
I don’t know… Could it beeee–
SATAN!?!?!
[sub][/churchlady][/sub]
Kaiser Soze
He has his plan set so meticulously to get rid of everyone who has ever crossed and in the end, he has even crossed the audience so you’re never sure if his story is true or not.
Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York” may have not been a great villian, but he was a hell of a lot of fun to watch. As goes with Agent Smith in the Matrix films.
Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Timothy Zahn trilogy of Star Wars novels. Cool, calculating, ruthless, but not truly evil. He was serving what he perceived to be a higher cause, not trying to gain power for himself. He was a very complex, interesting character, and one the audience didn’t feel obligated to hate.
But the best, all time greatestest villian of all was Mayor Richard Wilkins, the Big Bad from BtVS season three. He was the perfect Republican- outwardly warm and fuzzy, caring about traditional family values and all, while secretly he was plotting to turn into a huge demon snake and devour a bunch of high school seniors in the process.
What, don’t all Republicans secretly plan to turn into huge demon snakes and eat the young people who are supposed to be the future of our society?
Apocalypse or Galactus, take your pick.
How about a little love for Randall Flagg? He’s cool: He’s ruthless. He’s evil. He rules through fear and bloodshed. Granted, his flaw is his blind faith in himself and his minions. But, in a book with biblical overtones (The Stand), pride truly DOES go before a fall.
Brick Top, from Snatch. Most would cross them, but he’s such a great villain that people are too scared of him to confront him, an older-middle aged unlicensed boxing manager. The only people who do cross him don’t know who he is, hence his undoing.
Pss, hells no. They were just mindless automatrons passing themselves as beings. I hate the stories involving them, because defeating them invoves something very cheezy or a literal deus ex machina.
Please. If we’re talking about good villains, the number one criterion should be that they not violate any rule from the Evil Overlord List. Relevant excerpt:
34. I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.
Livia Soprano, woman least likely to win “Mother of the Year Award”. What an incredible character she was. Extremely funny at times, but at the same time psychotic, paranoid, delusiona, manipulative, and ruthless. She was really missed when she died; she was my favorite character on the show (though oddly enough, I consider Season 3 of The Sopranos the best season, hell the most brilliant thing on television in general).
Since people are bringing up video games and stuff, I’ll give a mention to Kerrigan in Starcraft. Probably the best and most developed PC characters ever in one of the best PC games ever. Made a hell of a villain too.
I second Kaiser Soze. And along a similar line, Tyler Durden.
It’s hard to defeat the villain if he’s YOU after all.
I also recommed villainess with a heart of gold Lady Eboshi from Mononoke-hime.
Runs a wholesale forest destruction, faces down semi-demonic fources, posseses the heartfelt devotion of her subjects, kills gods, and wears red lipstick for all of this. Plus, it takes cojones to have your arm ripped off by a disembodied head and not flinch.
Lord Vetinari is another possibility. Sure, he’s not strictly a villain, but you can’t deny he’d be good at it.
He’d be great, but I don’t think he has the evil streak to be a good villian. Ruthless practicality, certainly, but not evil.
Vetinari would be the perfect villian if only he’d stoop to villany.
This exactly describes the future of Earth in John Varley’s universe. Giant gaseos beings from Jupiter decide one day to occupy the earth. In less than a day, they destroy all of the major cities, kill nearly all of the population, and set up shop. The human inhabitants were merely a minor annoyance, like ants in the vacant lot where you want to build a house.
Mr. Burns from The Simpsons is pretty bad ass. He tried to block out the sun… that’s just shouldn’t be.
The Despiser was a terrible villain. Terrible in the way a villain is supposed to be, that is, not lame. I actually have memorized the speech you’re talking about, not on purpose but it has never left me, and it is chilling, as you say, but more so. “Say to the Council of Lords…that the uttermost limit of their span of days upon the land is seven times seven years from this present time.” Then he explains that if they don’t get the Staff of Law they won’t survive seven years, and if Covenant doesn’t bring the message they won’t survive ten seasons. The fact that you knew from the beginning it was hopeless except in the short term, and the only thing remaining was how short did cast quite a pall on the books (all six of them,) but then so did everything else in them. Still not as depressing as his remote space series, but hopeless nonetheless.
I think Memnoch the Devil from the fifth Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle is almost that bad. To bring Lestat the irrepressible to his knees is no small feat. It could be argued that Lestat is also evil but then so is Covenant.
What would this thread be without the walkin’ dude? He did fail in the end, unlike the Despiser, but that’s only because there is One Greater. At least it’s less hopeless than Covenant. Great pick.
Let’s not forget Cthulu. I mean, why vote for the lesser evil?
Also, I must submit that Tolkien villains are far too lame for this contest (sorry Doghouse Reilly). They’re always taken out by comparitively weak heroes, their own hubris, cheap deus ex machina action, or a combination of the three. 
A truly cool villain who fails must at least fail due to overwhelming badassedness on the hero’s part.
Not quite perfect analogy - the reason they wiped mankind off of Earth was we were threatening the only beings they thought of as sentient on the planet. If it wasn’t for the damn whales, they would have had no reason to pay any attention to us. It’s revealed in a later book (The Ophiuchi Hotline) that beings like those on Jupiter are the dominant form of life in the universe, but there are beings on our same mental plane that resist them.
So humans aren’t quite like ants to them, as ants do annoy us directly, yet are not a threat or potential threat, we just come into conflict with them because we share our environment with them. It would be more like if we found some primitive aliens that were in the process of being driven to extinction by some local form of social insect, and we decided to step in on their behalf.