You wouldn’t need to trap him, just offer the right part.
And, Bob’s your uncle!
(Did I use that right?)
Surely Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle?
It may have taken 25 years, but I believe that without Michael Douglas’s character in ‘Falling Down’, the world would have never known all day breakfast mcsandwiches.
I think William Foster is, like, the opposite of a villain with a point. A good guy who turns out not really trying to make a point at all, except ‘I’m crazy!’. Plus now, every 7 or 8 months when I think I want a McGriddle for lunch I can get one and be thoroughly disappointed with its soggy oversweetness.
Your disappointment is proof that he really is a villain. 
A well written villain believes he is the good guy. Authentic convictions and moral ambiguity is far better than mustache-twirling.
Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” is worthy of this list too. He truly believes that he is providing an essential service- not just physical protection, but more importantly he is protecting citizenry from the truth of how bad the world really is. While I do not agree that it is a true long term benefit in a democracy, I’d wager that most low information consumers prefer the illusion to the challenging truth.
Yeahbut. . .While Jack Nicholson’s character may have had a reason, it wasn’t a point. Not a good one, anyway.
Indeed, I’d wager that a nontrivial number of Americans are adherents to the idea, regardless of its merits. We’ve been at war for 19 years. Look about you! Americans appreciate the illusion more than dealing with the collateral damage.
Colonel Jessup may think he has some noble purpose, but the whole “we use words like ‘honor’, ‘code’, ‘loyalty’…” bit while he’s on the stand lying his ass off betrays that he’s just a hypocrite trying to cover his own ass.
The director is the true villian. Not sure about his point.
I thought from the trailers that the movie was about a “Joe Everyman” who snaps one day and loses it. Instead, it’s about a barely functioning loser who was already a failure at everything he did and had “lost it” some time ago. Even his personalized plate was stupid.
“Nut job does nut job things” isn’t really a basis for a good movie, not without a side of satire or irony or better action.
Excellent. I can’t help but hear that followup anytime I hear/see “Bob’s your uncle!”.
Jessup’s point wasn’t actually, “We do hard, dangerous, often morally compromising work so that people like you can sleep peacefully at night.” His point was, “Because we do that, little pissant pieces of shit like you don’t get to question me when one of my illegal orders leads to the murder of one of the men under my command.”
Exactly. If he had admitted the Code Red from the beginning, and the movie was about the morality of treating your own troops like that to protect your country, he’d have been a more ambivalent character. But the only reason to lie about the Code Red was to protect his (and Kiefer Sutherland’s) career.
Yes, I was agreeing with you, sorry I was unclear. The Cylons had zero reason to trust the Colonists, and the fact that the Colonists violated the treaty just led them to the reasonable conclusion they should strike first, not wait for a Colonist invasion.
“Traffic Jams will be a thing of the past”? In L.A.? Ha!
The villain from Jurassic Park 2 wasn’t really very evil, and had the heroes not screwed things up (well, one of them anyway) they would have nabbed some herbivores and that would have been the end of it.
Then there’s the non-villain from Twister which wasn’t a very good movie but pretends that “real” scientists are rough-hewn anti-establishments types… not people who actually do science.
I always felt Bill Paxton’s new girlfriend was unfairly portrayed as a bit of a villain in the movie, simply because she stood in the way of Paxton reuniting with his ex-wife Helen Hunt. The part where she asks if there’s such a thing as an F5 tornado after they describe how powerful an F4 tornado is and they all gasp because Hunts dad died in an F5, but asking about an F5 is literally the next logical step if you’re going through the entire tornado catalog.
Yeah. And, come on, if you’re a tornado chaser you’ve got to be a bit inured to people talking about F-5 tornadoes even if someone you loved died in one.
In one of “The Matrix” movies, Agent Smith compares humans to viruses. Can’t say I disagree with him.
In the Order of the Stick webcomic, even the heroes have accepted that Redcloak and the goblins have a valid complaint to be addressed. Redcloak is still a dick, though.
Xykon, however, has no point other than petty tyranny and destruction. Whether the Snarl has a point remains to be seen.
I found Agent Smith’s demonstration admirable, compelling (similar in quality with Al Pacino’s speech in The Devil’s Advocate where the devil argues that he is the perfect humanist).