Bad Guys

I'm frickin' tired of weenie-assed villains. I use the term "villain" because to my mind it invokes the archetypal bad guy who ties the damsel in distress to the tracks with just enough time for the hero to swoop in and rescue her.

Things I hate about villains:

• They recruit idiots.
  Why do villains surround themselves with bumbling fools?
  Maybe this is an artifact of evil dude psychology. I imagine that folks who are smart and evil enough to plan villainous activities either don't play well together or can't subjugate themselves to the will of another. So your typical mad, egomaniacal, super-genius bad guy really needs to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to find folks to implement his dastardly plan.
  This still doesn't quite wash. Movie baddies should take a cue from Bill Gates and recruit straight out of college. Especially with the bursting of the tech bubble, I'm sure there are plenty of mad, egomaniacal, super-genius engineers who would love to jump on board an organization in order to destroy/enslave the world.
• They can't shoot worth shit.
  I've spent a lot of my life around firearms. I know that I can put the majority of shots from a semiautomatic pistol on a 1'X2' steel plate at 100 yards. Of course, the steel plate isn't shooting back. Still, it drives me nuts to watch Tom Cruise roll through a hail of bullets unscathed.
  Sure, you can point to quite a number of tales about two guys who stand off a few feet from each other and empty the magazines of their respective weapons without effect. This happens a lot more than you might think, both in wartime and in law enforcement.
  Also, there are plenty of well-documented accounts of super-human feats of bravery and luck. Take Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sergeant Lucian Adams as an example:

  Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty on 28 October 1944, near St. Die, France. When his company was stopped in its effort to drive through the Mortagne Forest to reopen the supply line to the isolated third battalion, S/Sgt. Adams braved the concentrated fire of machineguns in a lone assault on a force of German troops. Although his company had progressed less than 10 yards and had lost 3 killed and 6 wounded, S/Sgt. Adams charged forward dodging from tree to tree firing a borrowed BAR from the hip. Despite intense machinegun fire which the enemy directed at him and rifle grenades which struck the trees over his head showering him with broken twigs and branches, S/Sgt. Adams made his way to within 10 yards of the closest machinegun and killed the gunner with a hand grenade. An enemy soldier threw hand grenades at him from a position only 10 yards distant; however, S/Sgt. Adams dispatched him with a single burst of BAR fire. Charging into the vortex of the enemy fire, he killed another machinegunner at 15 yards range with a hand grenade and forced the surrender of 2 supporting infantrymen. Although the remainder of the German group concentrated the full force of its automatic weapons fire in a desperate effort to knock him out, he proceeded through the woods to find and exterminate 5 more of the enemy. Finally, when the third German machinegun opened up on him at a range of 20 yards, S/Sgt. Adams killed the gunner with BAR fire. In the course of the action, he personally killed 9 Germans, eliminated 3 enemy machineguns, vanquished a specialized force which was armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers, cleared the woods of hostile elements, and reopened the severed supply lines to the assault companies of his battalion.

  S/Sgt. Lucian Adams: a man with stone cold balls of titanium and a faint, red glow in his eyes. The reason we hear these stories is that they are remarkable. What usually happens is much more mundane: one or both guys get seriously dead.
• They do nothing simply.
  If a villain needs to kill someone important, they need to do it in some amazingly baroque, eminently thwartable fashion. Perfect examples of this are Goldfinger and his laser, Bruce Willis as The Jackal and his remote control gun, and the hitman in Brannigan.

Now, the reasons why filmmakers persist in piling their villains with all this ridiculous baggage is that they're trying to entertain folks the only way they know how.

Villains need to be surrounded by idiots. Otherwise they would succeed in flying airliners into high-rises, setting off dirty bombs that render city centers uninhabitably radioactive, or striking down an entire populace in an epidemic of smallpox.

Villains need to be bad shots. Otherwise, movie makers couldn't have noisy gunfights to "entertain" you and assault your eardrums. Either that or the gunfight and movie would be very short.

Villains need to have intricate and flawed plans. Few moviegoers would pay $9.00 to watch a five-minute short of some faceless hitman quietly putting a bullet in James Bond's brain.

So a certain kind of movie requires a certain kind of villain. I wish we could do away with that certain kind of movie.

Pakeha

Columns by Pakeha