Three Movie Villains Who Were Wrongly Allowed to Live

There aren't all that many films where the bad guys are allowed to win. That's just kind of the nature of being a villain. Every now and then however the villain may be allowed live or even escape at the end of the movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, "The Silence of the Lambs" is a great example of a villain (though not the primary one in this case) escaping done right. However there are some films that spared the villains who by all rights should have been struck dead. Be warned there will be some spoilers revealed about all the films discussed below.

"Serenity" - The Operative
Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his crew aboard the space ship Serenity are on the run from the government. They're giving shelter to a girl who knows things that nobody should know, and the Alliance sends the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to track them down. The Operative is a self admitted monster, but he is a true believer in his cause. He never questions that his horrible actions are truly for the good of the people and that more than anything is what makes him dangerous. He has no issue with slaughtering children for his cause, yet he is allowed to live at the end of the film.

The problem here is really that the Operative being allowed to live is a near total betrayal of the character of Mal. This is a man who in the past has kicked a person he'd already beaten into his ship's jet engine just to make a point. While Mal has shown that he values human life in general he's also very quick to take out the people he sees as not deserving to live. So when a man like that lets somebody who has killed his personal friends as well as innocent children it just doesn't make any sense. It is true that the real defeat of the Operative came from revealing to him that his cause was hollow and hypocritical, effectively killing his spirit. However even after that Mal would have killed him out of straight up vengeance, or at least he should have done.

"Con Air" - Garland Greene
One of the many over the top action movies from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a wild ride that is fun and shouldn't be looked at too closely. However even for an entertaining yet disposable bit of popcorn fun there something at the end that is so fundamentally wrong it demands attention. Nicholas Cage is a good man in prison for killing another man in self defense. He finds himself on board a transport plane with many far worse criminals who then proceed to hijack the plane. There's a ton of nasty characters, but one of particular note is Steve Buscemi playing Garland "The Marietta Mangler" Greene. Despite having the worst criminal record of any of the convicts on the plane he is not only allowed to live, he in fact walks away free and clear from the whole thing. And what's more, as the final shot of the film, it's clear that the audience is supposed to be happy that this monster is free.

The logic of the film seems to be that since he didn't do anything crazy in the two hours the movie takes place in then he must be an ok guy who deserves not only to live but to escape completely free. This of course ignores the monstrosities that he committed that landed him in jail in the first place. The idea that the film hinges everything on is that Greene seemed moved by that one girl he met and he didn't do anything to her. So a guy with a psychotically violent history resists the urge to kill and mutilate a child once and he's all set to rejoin society? For all the audience knows Greene has let others go before only to kill others later, it's certainly no indication that he's suddenly all better. There is an argument to be made that he's portrayed sympathetically enough that he shouldn't have been killed, but under no circumstances should the audience have been encouraged to be happy about his freedom.

"Diamonds are Forever" - Blofeld
Blofeld was well established as a villain in the James Bond films by the time this movie rolled around. Sean Connery returned as Bond, after his first replacement George Lazenby left the franchise after only one film, and Charles Gray portrayed Blofeld. Blofeld actually suffers multiple fake deaths thanks to having numerous doubles in place. The real one puts in motion a plot to use diamonds to power an orbiting satellite and hold the world's nuclear arsenal for ransom to the highest bidder. Naturally Bond foils the scheme, this time but crashing Blofeld's mini-sub, with Blofeld still in it, into the villain's control center.

This is a bit of an odd one because to look at the film on its own it's possible, even likely, that Blofeld did die at the end. However the crashing of his mini-sub proved to not be a definitive enough end because he would turn up again in the pre-credit sequence of "For Your Eyes Only," and therein lies the problem. By this point, despite being played by a different actor in every film, Blofeld had become the iconic villain of the James Bond universe. He made a total of six appearances in the films and was responsible for the death of Bond's new bride in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." His importance to the series makes the final appearance in "For Your Eyes Only" all the more painful, as Bond nonchalantly drops him down a chimney stack from a helicopter after a quick baldness joke. If only to spare fans this painful end for such an iconic character, his death should have been more definitive in "Diamonds are Forever." Two shots to the head would have done nicely.