Four Movie Villains Who Deserved to Win

For every hero there must be a villain. There must be an enemy who is as wicked as the hero is noble, a final obstacle for the hero to overcome. But sometimes things aren't as black and white as these stories would like us to believe. Sometimes the villain isn't really that bad. Sometimes what the villain is after isn't really going to hurt anybody, and there's no reason they shouldn't just be allowed to have it. Sometimes the villain deserves to win. Following are four examples of movies that featured villains who really should have been allowed victory.

"The Mummy" - ImotepAs a general rule if your character also serves as the title for a horror movie then you're a pretty bad guy. Being a member of the undead who sucks out the bodily fluids of victims in order to regenerate your own rotting flesh should seal the deal. But there's something a little off about this supposedly evil re-animated corpse. First there's his back-story which seems to be the embodiment of excessive punishment. Basically he fell in love with the wrong woman, the Pharaoh's lover in this case. But it was that girl who killed the Pharaoh, not Imotep. All he did was try to bring her back from the dead. Sure it's kind of a creepy thing to do but does it really warrant a curse so severe that it had never been performed before or since? Seems like overkill.

Even setting the back-story aside he's still not really all that bad once he's resurrected and starts killing people either. Nearly every character killed by Imotep in "The Mummy" is responsible for their own demise. First there's the Americans who opened the cursed chest who Imotep then hunted down and drained of their fluids. Sure it's a nasty way to die but there was a big warning on the chest and these guys opened it anyways. The only supposed "innocent" that Imotep targets is Evelyn, but she's just as guilty as the stupid Americans. Imotep wouldn't even have come back to life to kill anybody if she hadn't read aloud from an ancient book, a book that she stole from another expedition for the record. And why is Imotep so gung ho to take these people out? Same reason as before: he just wants his girlfriend back. By the sequel Imotep had developed some world conquering intentions but this first time around he was just doing it for love. Leave the poor guy alone.

"The Matrix" - The MachinesCold, heartless, ruthless unfeeling machines have taken over the world, enslaved humanity and seek to exterminate those who have slipped through their grasp. It doesn't get more simplistically evil than that right? Except there's a few wrinkles in this view. First it needs to be said that the machines are probably the most generous jailers in history. Since they only need humans for their inherent energy and body heat they don't really even need to devise a program to keep our minds busy in the first place, it's a courtesy. What's more it's revealed that they tried to give us a utopia at first but our disturbed little brains didn't believe in it enough for that to work. Yes it's true that the people still "plugged in" are slaves but they never know it. They get to live normal, even happy lives. If they're so fortunate as to be set "free" then they have a glorious life of living underground in fear and eating tasteless mush. And lest we forget, the machines didn't drive humanity under ground. Morpheus points out that "it was us who torched the sky" and brought about permanent darkness on the surface. Things get even more complicated when the animated shorts contained in "The Animatrix" are taken into account since some of them show how miserably we treated the machines when we were in charge.

Ok but what about Agent Smith? He's threatening to destroy everything and at the very least Neo and the "free minds" are essential to stopping that. Not so fast: Smith only becomes a serious problem after Neo tries to destroy him and ends up breaking Smith from his programing. For that matter agents wouldn't have even been necessary in the first place if there weren't "free" humans jumping in and out of the system, messing everything up. And let's talk collateral damage for a minute. Neo and his cohorts have absolutely no issue killing the very people they claim to be trying to free. Talk about taking "if you're not with us, then you're against us" to the extreme.

"Kill Bill Vol. 2" - BillAssassin, jealous lover and all around bastard. After knocking up the favorite member of his hit squad Bill didn't take her leaving him so lightly. She vanished without a word and he thought she was dead. When he found out that she's alive, instead of jumping for joy he sicked his henchmen and women on her during her wedding. "The Bride" ended up in a coma for years before waking up to take her well earned revenge. But it's not quite that simple. Bill thought the love of his life had died and instead found out that she was pregnant with his baby. Rather than tell him about the pregnancy she ran away and decided to marry some random loser. Yes he over-reacted, and admitted as much himself. But no matter who you are that scenario is going to tick you off, and when the ticked off party is the world's deadliest assassin what would anybody expect?

But it's really the child that makes this complicated. The Bride thinks that her daughter is dead, but instead the kid is alive and has been raised by Bill for the last four years or so. That might sound like a nightmare but it's quite clear that Bill has made a safe, stable and loving home for his child. He disbanded his group of assassins and has gotten out of that game, which is why the Bride has to hunt them down all across the globe. Basically he's had four years with a child he loves and it has mellowed him out. The Bride hasn't been mellowing, she's been seething in a coma and has absolutely no idea how to be a mother. That's not to say she could never learn but one would think Bill could help her with that. It can't be a good thing for a child when the mother she never knew comes back and kills the father she loves. Bill was not a nice guy. However just like parents should try to be civil during a divorce for the sake of their children, maybe it would have been best if the Bride didn't kill her baby's father while the kid was asleep in the next room. But if somebody absolutely had to die it would have been much less traumatic for the innocent child if it had been the Bride.

"Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" - Captain BarbossaHow can a villain get any more classic than a merciless pirate? Barbossa has true pirate nastiness running through his veins. He lives to rob, kidnap and plunder. He also has no issues with spilling a bit of blood along his way. Barbossa lead the mutiny that cost Captain Jack Sparrow to lose his ship. Now he suffers from a curse that renders him immortal, halfway between living and dead and all the more dangerous for it. He kidnaps the leading lady, wants to slit Will Turner's throat for his blood and maroons Jack on an abandoned island... for the second time. Also to be quite blunt he's just a nasty guy with his long nails, scraggly beard and yellow eyes. What could be redeeming about somebody like this?

Well the issue isn't really that he has redeeming features, rather that what he's after isn't really causing a danger to anybody. All Barbossa and his crew want is to be free of the curse that was put upon them for stealing Aztec gold. Sure he's a pirate, and a pretty nasty one at that. But what makes him so dangerous as a pirate is the fact that he can't be killed. Of course if he actually won and got what he wanted he'd be mortal again, and thus probably not nearly as brazen or deadly on the seas as he was before. Really the only person who was ever in jeopardy over this was Will Turner. Granted Barbossa was ready to slit the boy's throat. However he probably would have been happy just to prick Turner's finger for a few drops of blood (as he did when he thought he needed Elizabeth Swan's blood) if Turner and Sparrow hadn't made things so difficult. Nobody's saying he's a nice guy, but Barbossa's big scheme was just to be mortal again: where's the harm in that?