Sometimes, in a book or film or television show, the villain will do something, usually through a misunderstanding or a complete disconnect with the hero’s motivations or plans, that leads to his or her own detriment.
For instance, in LOTR, Sauron lets himself be panicked by Aragorn’s “announcement” of his birthright in the Palantir, leading him to prematurely attack Minas Tirith before his troops are at full strength. This leads to the Rohirrim and the Dead arriving in time to beat the Mordorian forces back and saves Minas Tirith, which further distracts Sauron from the hobbits sneaking up on his flank.
Another example is from the Nero Wolfe novels. Arnold Zeck is possibly the most dangerous crime boss in the world. He’s so powerful and dangerous that even Nero Wolfe recognizes that going against him would be very difficult and require him to give up his present life for an undetermined amount of time while he pursues Zeck. For this reason, Wolfe tends to steer clear of Zeck, refusing cases that involve him, instructing Archie to never mention the name, and so on. Basically, Wolfe is not sure, even in his otherwise limitless ego, if he would come out of a battle with Zeck intact.
At one point, Arnold Zeck takes the absolutely wrong path. He suspects that Wolfe is about to come after him, so he has the rooftop orchid greenhouses shot to shards by machine guns from a neighboring rooftop. Of course, the orchid houses are about the most important thing in Wolfe’s entire life, so…Wolfe abandons the brownstone, goes underground, and takes Zeck down. What Zeck saw as a warning shot, Wolfe saw as a declaration of war. Stupid, stupid move.
Goldfinger wasn’t so bad - at least he was trying to get a sense of what Bond knows of his operation. So he wasn’t necessarily intending to kill him immediately.
The worst offender (of many) in the James Bond film canon has to be Mister Big from Live and Let Die. I particularly cannot get over the scene where he (or his badly-named henchman “Tee Hee”) has Bond at gunpoint, and instead of shooting him, uses the gun to force Bond onto a crocodile-infested swamp island. The intent is clearly to kill Bond immediately, they ask Bond no questions, they throw dead chickens to the island to attract the crocodiles to Bond…so why the heck didn’t they just shoot him with the gun???
Imho, the archetype would be the emperor from Gladiator. Why even bother trying to fight the slave one-on-one? The only possible chance the slave had was if the emperor did something stupid like that.
There are plenty of examples, but both of these are bad ones. Neither was based on any kind of stupid move - both might have been perfectly sensible, except that both characters lacked specific information and no reasonable way of getting it.
IN Sauron’s case, fort example, he knew only that the Ring was once again becoming active and moving towards him. He had every reason to suspect Aragorn had it and was planning to use it against him. Moreover, his forces were not set into motion by “panick”. Rather, they were already assaulting Minas Tirith well before the episode with the Palantir. The forces he had there were more than enough to destroy Gondor and Rohan together, and only lost because of a yet a third factor (the Dead) and the total loss of his Corsair fleet and forces.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that he had Mordor locked up tighter than a Swiss Bank, couldn’t imagine that somebody might try to destroy the Ring, and couldn’t even begin to conceive of Gandalf sending Hobbits to do it.
So a bit of a fail there on the OP’s part, not Sauron’s.
Because a gun shot proves homicide, whereas death by crocodile could be misadventure? I didn’t see the movie, so I don’t know if they’d be concerned about getting caught up in a murder investigation.
If Lord Humungus would’ve laid off the daily dirt bike rallies and tractor pulls and instituted some kind of carpool system they wouldn’t have needed oil so badly.
You have an army of monkeys and a capella palace guards and you’re going to get your revenge on the little girl who killed your sister with an hour glass placed next to a bucket of water.
The makeup and mutilated face were more than enough to intimidate your employees you might need a few of them to carry out your plan. You know, for the greater evil.
In “Casablanca” the Vichy French police/ Germans don’t search Sam’s piano for the Letters of Transit. Captain Louis Renard also assumes that Rick is just as cynical and greedy as he is when he gets him to come alone and call off his watchdogs, believing he would turn over Victor Laszlo to him.
In the movie “Compulsion”, based on the real life Leopold and Loeb murder, they key piece of evidence is a pair of eyeglasses with a unique hinge, left on the scene of what was supposed to be a perfect crime.
