10 Movie Heroes Completely Outmatched By The Villain
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
Any story is ultimately worthless without characters that an audience can connect to and care about. In particular, with few exceptions, there has to be a protagonist for those watching to root for.
As important as the hero are the obstacles they come up against. You can typically assume that by the end of the movie, the protagonist will be standing tall, but their victory has to be earned. It's as much about the journey as it is the destination, and what they go through is incredibly important.
A hero is only as good as the villain they face, and while such fights have to at least portray the illusion that the hero is in some danger of losing, there are those villains that genuinely are insurmountable. You can root for the hero all you want, but sometimes, they're simply outmatched.
From fights that came down to the wire, to psychological battles, to conflicts that were only ever going to have one outcome, these villains gave our noble heroes a bloody tough day at the office.
10. Batman Vs. The Joker - The Dark Knight
Out of Batman's impressive and unparalleled rogues gallery, the Joker is his greatest rival. A relationship unlike any other in comic-book history, pitting Batsy against the Joker on the big screen just makes sense, no matter which actor is behind the cowl.
When Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne took on Heath Ledger’s Joker in 2008, the fight was an uneven one in the physical sense. He could throw around the Joker all day long, and the Joker knew it.
The real fight between these two was a psychological one, and quite simply one that Batman could never win. It took Bruce an entire third movie just to clean up the mess caused in this one!
The Joker set up the game by his own rules, trying to goad the Dark Knight into breaking his rules. He may have found a loophole when he ‘didn’t save’ Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, but he would never kill the Joker, at least in this reality. And in a sense, this meant that Batman was doomed to lose.
He could win the punchy-punchy bits certainly, but his conscience and morality prevented him from taking that extra step he needed to truly end the Joker's reign of terror.