I’ve heard too that in real-life organized crime and such, killing your own guys doesn’t even really happen that often, because why would anyone want to work for you, then? It’s a terrible way to create loyalty.
When the villain’s signature weapon is a knife or sword covered in spikes with a blade with a bunch of whorls in it, like this guy, who was the villain in the Stallone potboiler, Cobra:
It’s hard to take a villain seriously when he buys his weapons at a kiosk in the food court at a suburban indoor mall.
Considering there were four sequels, I guess he went back for it.
Agreed. I’m absolutely OVER the villain whose is always one step ahead. The heroes attempt to trap the villain? The villain realized it was a trap and reversed it. The heroes get some secret information that should give them an edge over the villain? The villain planted it. The heroes capture the villain? Only because he wanted them to, because they’re going to very predictably lock him up in precisely the right place with precisely the right sloppy security steps which will allow him to escape.
The villain certainly needs to win sometimes for there to be suspense and stakes. But it just gets tedious when it’s always always always.
BO-RING.
Some egregious examples of this:
-Season 1 of Legend of Korra
-4 or 5 James Bond movies ago, where they capture a super-hacker, and decide to lock him up in a computer-controlled cell
-Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars extended universe
This is adjacent to, but not quite identical to, the plot which seems super clever and twisty and dramatic as it’s being revealed over the course of the story… but then when you get to the end, and look back on the whole thing, it makes no sense at all. Some examples of this are:
-Most episodes of BBC’s Sherlock
-Captain America: Civil War
Hmm, that would certainly make Cool Hand Luke a very different movie.
One of you divides humanity into two groups, and the other decides which to kill?
The thing about Thanos is that he thought he was the good guy, and as a good guy, he had his own moral code. In his mind, he had no right to decide who lives or dies - no one had appointed him judge, jury and executioner. He just wanted to be fair, and give everyone a chance.
I’ve always wondered, was there any chance that Thanos could have been part of the population taken out by The Snap? Was he so sure that he was doing the right thing that he was willing to die for his belief? Or was he guaranteed to survive since he was the one wielding the gauntlet?
I doubt he’d allow himself to die in the Snap, because he later had to use the stones to destroy themselves. If he hadn’t, someone might have reversed the his actions.
But he was willing to die for his beliefs. He knew people would be coming to kill him afterwards - if not the Avengers, then someone else. As we saw, he didn’t even try to put up a fight.
Um … no. LOL
I’m thinking that we definitely want to preserve our intellectuals, our scientists, our artists, etc. I’m talking about people in the top ten percent of all humans who are having a markedly positive effect on human society.
At the opposite end of the spectrum we would have those that are definitely going to go like career criminals, child abusers, etc.
We would spin the wheel on the rest.
Josh Brolin (who I can’t stop thinking of as the big brother riding the little girl’s bike down a steep mountain road in Goonies) gave us a poignant take on Thanos.
When we’d gotten glimpses of Thanos as post-credits scenes in earlier movies, I rolled my eyes, thinking here comes another Big Bad Villain whose whole motivation is Being Evil And Destroying Good Guys And Ruling The Universe™.
But Brolin really sold him as a guy trying to save everyone by snuffing half of them. And then finally getting some peace and quiet until his end comes and he pays for what he did.
The 2011 movie Limitless included a Russian loan shark who warned Eddie Morra not to skip out on repayment, saying he would cut Morra’s skin around the waist, pull it up over Morra’s head and tie it in a knot, asphyxiating him. I liked the movie, but that line took the loan shark character from plausible to silly.
Anybody remember the film “the Cell” from back in 2000? In his review, Roger Ebert describes the antagonist as
”a seriously twisted man whose libido needs such complicated tending it hardly seems worth the trouble”
Seriously, how do these killers find the time and money to do all this elaborate stuff? Just once, I’d like to see the elaborate torture machine blow the breaker because the serial killer just isn’t as handy as he thinks he is.
And having a corpse next to it that is missing it’s testicles is what is referred to in the parlance of the profession as a “clue.”
Judging from my experience with the Jack Reacher series, the over the top villains were intentional. Reacher himself is VERY over the top, from his size, to his past and skills.
Yeah, it seems to be going for silly fun.
Which is fine by me. I enjoyed the book. I’d give it a solid B. I might read more in the series later.
Right - you can generally rule out suicide.
I’m wondering how he got the guard’s body on the roof of the elevator in SotL.
I’m so there for that. I remember in season 1 of the very silly Dexter, there as a scene where the serial killer had killed someone, and then set up a whole elaborate display of chopped-up-victim in the middle of an NHL arena in the middle of the night, with all the lights on and stuff. There’s a reason that people who are setting up elaborate pranks/shows/messages for other people (proposals, invitations to proms, gender reveals, whatever) don’t do them in the middle of NHL arenas… which is that it’s incredibly hard and illegal and requires all sorts of precise knowledge of security and electronics and lighting and god knows what… and that’s for pranks where if you get caught you’d be arrested for trespassing and minor vandalism or something, not murder.
I’ve only seen a few sets of testicles in person, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t the size of a hard boiled egg. A large egg is about 6 cm long and 5 cm diameter at it’s widest. Some quick googling shows a large chicken egg has a volume of 48 ml, a human testicle ranges 12-19 ml.
We have a whole thread about the ethical issues raised by the 2nd Snap, etc over in GD.