10 Awesome Movie Villains That Had Totally Lame Deaths

What are the qualities of an awesome movie villain? The most diabolical plan? The best weapon? A white cat to stroke? Movie villains come in all shapes and sizes and often these devilish, dastardly, die-hards deserve a fitting end to their life's pursuit of world domination, sweet revenge, or cunning heists (and some, as we know, just want to watch the world burn.)

Whatever the motivation, what all the most awesome movie villains really need is an equally awesome death.

Notable examples include: Belloq's exploding head in Raiders, Palpatine thrown down an extremely long shaft and then exploded (more on that later), Blofeld being thrown from a helicopter and then falling down an industrial sized chimney or that smiling son of a b*tch shark being exploded from a single bullet. The one common thread - these were the deaths they deserved. Not all are quite so lucky and some villains are short changed at the last minute.

So what's the problem here Hollywood? All that time and effort, in some cases over multiple films, all ending in a damp squib? These guys deserved better than this! Here are the most awesome movie villains with the lamest, most anticlimactic deaths in cinema history.

Tom Hardy's Bane really is awesome. The problem is Heath Ledger's Joker. Before Ledger, most movie villains at least stood a chance at individuality, now every single performance is held up to the Joker litmus test of on screen bad guys.

Nolan and Ledger had effectively set the bar so high it would've taken nothing short of a miracle to come close to what they had achieved. The Dark Knight Rises has its share of problems; the fact that Gotham fares better under Wayne and Gordon's all encompassing lie perpetuated by The Dent Act and that life actually gets worse when Bane lets the truth "have its day," sat awkwardly with audiences, whether they realised it or not.

Hardy's Bane is a unique: motivated, lethal and clever. The voice work received enough complaints from the IMAX previews to force Nolan and Hardy to remix the vocal tracks at the last minute, nonetheless, Bane's vocalisation has now become a parody of itself, imitated, aped and analysed but above all, accepted and enjoyed by fans of the character.

His immense physicality and meticulous 'diabolical plan' skills are self-evident, as he has Batman by his furry little b*lls for most of the film. So, when Catwoman rocked up on the Bat-Pod and sent him spinning across the floor like a Border Collie on linoleum, it was a colossal anti-climax. Awesome villain, but it's movie sin to go out like that - off guard and crying like a puppy dog.