10 Dumbest Villains In Movie History
3. Magneto - X-Men (2000)
Our second comic's not-so-supervillain on this list is everyone's favourite mutant silver fox, Magneto. Never one of the Marvel Universe's most effective strategists, Magneto's plans in the comics tend to feature his attempts to secede from the planet Earth entirely and create his own mutant nation: a goal that's met with significant failure over the years.
The very first X-Men movie had a hard task to pull off making superheroes work on the big screen now that special effects were finally impressive and cheap enough to detail the vast range of super powers that such movies need to portray convincingly. As one of the pioneers of these films, director Bryan Singer had his work cut out for him, but succeeded in not only creating a franchise, but in spearheading a revolution in blockbuster cinema.
Sadly, one of the things that his movie doesn't succeed in doing is setting up Magneto and the Brotherhood Of Mutants as a significant threat. The grand scheme that the X-Men are poised to thwart is utterly bobbins, a mad scientist's halfway house of an idea. Magneto has somehow acquired a large and extraordinarily complex device that, powered by his own abilities, will supposedly transform humans into mutants. Where he obtained it from, the film never makes clear, certainly neither he not anyone else in his Brotherhood has the wherewithal to conceive and build it. His stated aim is to use this machine on the world leaders' summit at Ellis Island, to turn the most powerful homo sapiens in the world into homo superior.
Unfortunately, it's never fully explained what he hopes to gain from this either. Presumably he believes that forcibly transforming all of these political supremos into his own race will make some form of political point, that they'll be forced to recognise that mutants are people, too. The fact that the machine doesn't actually work doesn't seem to affect his plans in the slightest. The idea that a political revolutionary would waste so much time, effort, planning, and money in perpetrating a terrorist assault with no clear political or practical objective in mind one that in fact would be far more likely to bring down government sanctions on mutant activity worldwide and directly bring about the kind of concentration camp hell that he was trying to avoid, makes Magneto one of the dumbest supervillains ever to have been delivered to the big screen.