10 Heroic Movie Characters Who Actually Didn't Affect The Plot

8. Cameron Poe - Con Air

Nic Cage ruins a lot of things - and he almost ruined an awful lot more, judging by the number of films he was ludicrously linked with at one stage - but he seems to get a free pass for his character's idiocy in Con Air, because he utters the greatest stuffed bunny-based line in action movie history.

But no matter how cult a character the raggedy-haired former Army Ranger Cameron Poe is, there's no mistaking the fact that he is pretty much superfluous in Con Air's conclusion.

When John Malkovich takes over Con Air full of hardened criminals and a couple of hugely inappropriate passengers (Poe himself and Bubba With Diabetes,) his plan was never going to succeed. He might have been a smart villain with that infinitely valuable skill of crawling under your skin and staying there, but he doesn't account for the fact that the US law enforcement agencies have a man inside who will probably halt the plot before it even starts to really get going, or that the VIP criminal on board is going to double cross everyone and leave them to die or be recaptured in the desert anyway.

All Poe does is get the undercover man killed, and takes his place, which doesn't really matter since he proves himself to be mostly useless at actually halting the villainous plot, other than to kill a few nasties who would have either died or been back in prison anyway when they got to the stop-over spot where they were supposed to be boarding a new plane to escape.

He achieves precisely nothing valuable, other than apparently redeeming himself for his initial crime of self-defence and protecting a pregnant woman, which apparently comes with mandatory prison time in Con Air's stupid world. And the cost of that is a ruined Las Vegas and a serial killer on the loose, in the shape of Steve Buscemi.