5. The Villain Is Just A Lackey For Somebody Else
Appears In: The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer & Green Lantern Distinguished from the decoy villain, the lackey is someone who is presented to us as the main villain for the vast majority of the film, but near the climax, it transpires that they in fact answer to a higher villain after all. In The Avengers, we saw that the Chitauri were simply working for Thanos, the Silver Surfer was a slave to Galactus in Fantastic Four 2, in Green Lantern, Hector Hammond is at the behest of Parallax, and in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane is in fact working for Talia al Ghul. It's a cheap move because it instantly devalues the villain and makes him seem like a bit of a wimp. If this fact is revealed at the tail end of the movie, it's all the more disappointing, and often weakens our perception of otherwise classic comic book movie villains.