10 Dumbest Villains In Movie History
7. Raoul Silva - Skyfall (2012)
It's fairly well documented that Bond villains have the forward planning ability and self-preservation instincts of depressed lemmings. In fact, it's such a well-known trope of the franchise that it's not even a meme. Even Michael McIntyre doesn't use it as a basis for observational comedy. Thats how played out the idea is.
But Silva's epic revenge plot in the embarrassingly inept Skyfall is another kettle of fish entirely. You see, the events of the movie that lead to his capture at the end of the second act are entirely orchestrated by him, so that he can find himself in MI6's underground headquarters, where he will escape and obtain his revenge upon M for abandoning him all those years ago. Escape he does, and Silva ambushes M at a court appearance. It's all part of the plan. Except plan? This elaborate web of wish-fulfillment and incompetence held together by spit and hope, does not, in anyone's idea of the word, constitute a plan.
Being captured in the first place relies on Bond being led to his secret island hideaway at precisely the right time, an outcome that here, revolves around 007 turning on his accomplice Sévérine and surviving assassination by her bodyguards and his own henchmen. It also assumes that MI6 will want him alive, and will not just murder him in the face: something that Bond is not just trained to do but is actually famous for. Once captured, his plan to escape MI6's underground fortress relies upon the knuckleheads holding him choosing to link the computer of a known cyber-terrorist (who'd already breached their computer security to blow up an MI6 office) to their own mainframe. Even once he'd done so, he then left the base he'd worked so hard to get into, and simply turned up at M's public inquiry wearing a police uniform to start shooting people.
Surely, surely, surely, if he knew enough about the public inquiry to have men ready with disguises to infiltrate it with guns, he'd have no need to be captured by Britain's secret services anyway. He'd have no need to set up any of this over-wrought trap, or hope for any of these individual plot strands to fall into place. As it is, the culmination of his Machiavellian scheming sees him forced to follow M and Bond to a remote house on the Scottish moors with a dozen or so well armed thugs to try and kill them. That's some intellectual forethought, right there. All of this makes Silva the dumbest Bond villain in history, a long and illustrious list of stupidity. The only reason that Silva isn't number one on this list is that the film is so irredeemably stupid that his plan actually almost works.