10 Badass Movie Villains Defeated Way Too Easily

From the moment they show up, the alien tripods in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds absolutely wreck shop.

In the film's first encounter scene, a lone tripod slaughters dozens of helpless humans, destroys a bunch of buildings like they're made of paper, and forces everybody in the surrounding area to run for their lives. The message is clear: this is an enemy that will not stop, and one that cannot be stopped.

Spielberg's movie is actually one of his more underrated efforts, and the way he depicts the aliens as cold, calculated and merciless makes for some genuinely haunting scenes - one particular moment in which a tripod pins a man down and starts sucking out his insides, as blood sprays through the air onto Tom Cruise's hand, is especially hard to stomach.

Despite the director's best efforts though, the ending of the movie is a big ol' letdown, and that's because the way the aliens are dealt with is frustratingly abrupt, with the entire army of space droids getting wiped out because they caught the sniffles.

This is how H.G. Wells' original book ended, of course, but that doesn't mean Spielberg should've stuck so closely to it. He built the tripods up and up and up as these nigh-on indestructible creatures of terror for 80% of his movie's runtime, only to turn them into useless wimps right at the very end. Laaaaaame.

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Got any other badass movie villains that were bumped off pretty easily? Leave your picks in the comments section!