10 Dumbest Villain Plans In Movies
4. Trying To Kill Thornhill With A Crop Duster - North By Northwest
Sometimes a villain's plan is so freaking cool that it manages to compensate for the sheer stupidity of it all, as is basically the case in Alfred Hitchcock's masterful suspense thriller North by Northwest.
When spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) plots to have ad exec protagonist Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) killed, he doesn't merely dispatch a hitman to cap him in the head, but instead has him ambushed by an assassin in a crop duster plane.
It gets a 10/10 for theatricality, but in practical terms it's pretty dumb. You've already got the drop on Thornhill, who isn't suspecting to be attacked, so why bother with something so conspicuous that also has a huge margin of error?
As a result, Thornhill is able to survive the encounter by causing the plane to crash, and of course goes on to foil Vandamm. If Vandamm had kept things simple, most of his troubles could've been over with a single bullet - though that would've been the audience's loss, obviously.
Hilariously, though, Hitchcock's original idea for the scene was to have Vandamm somehow arrange for Thornhill to get swept up by a tornado - until writer Ernest Lehman politely reminded the director of how utterly ridiculous an idea that was.
By comparison, the crop duster seems totally reasonable.