10 James Bond Villains With The Most Sinister Plans
Where killing millions is a mere obstacle - they're quite mad, you know.
In the beginning, there was a mad scientist called Dr. Julius No, who didn't take too kindly to his services being rejected by the West. The bad Doctor, instead, became a member of SPECTRE, which fuelled his Machiavellian motivation: to sabotage the launch of an American rocket.
Although totally useless at clambering up metallic apparatuses, Dr. No did prophetically point out silkily yet sinisterly to James Bond that this was "only the first step to prove our power". Indeed the agents of SPECTRE, the big boss himself, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and many other criminal brains have devised all manner of sinister and sensational schemes to try to thwart Her Majesty's finest suave superspy and mwahaha take over the world!
Of course, this is pretty much what we expect from our rogues' gallery of Bondian villains, with the weirder, wackier and more well-thought-out plans separating the wheat (weaponising a rare orchid) from the chaff (using a bog-standard nuclear bomb).
So gather around for an oh-so secret meeting of Thunderball and Spectre proportions and indulge your inner megalomaniac...
10. Auric Goldfinger - Miracle (Almost) On Bullion Boulevard (Goldfinger)
There are bank jobs, and then there are bank jobs.
Auric Goldfinger's audacious and ingenious crime of the century - to break into the world's most secure vault at Fort Knox and contaminate its gold reserves in order to cause economic chaos in the West, and greatly increase his own gold price - still remains the gold standard (pun very much intended) to which every Bond villain scheme is benchmarked against. Even Bond himself called it an "inspired deal", with no little amount of admiration too.
Fifteen years in the making, every detail scrupulously prepared, every eventuality considered - right down to opening on a Sunday. The brilliantly badass-sounding Operation Grand Slam is satisfyingly revealed in all its fiendish glory at Auric Stud: with a pool table, bar, and the floor all interchanged to reveal a large map, and a 3D model of Fort Knox on the floor to which Goldfinger stands imposingly over like a godlike spectre.
All doubts about its viability are confidently and vehemently dismissed - just like those mob bosses afterwards - by the man in love with the colour, brilliance and divine heaviness of gold. The electrified fences? It will be dynamited! Fort Knox is bombproof? That crown jewels-cutting industrial laser gun will take care of that. The 41,000 troops stationed in the area? An invisible nerve gas dispersed by Pussy Galore's Flying Circus will immobilise them. Now that's how you showcase a diabolical plan, with a dash of the old double-cross for good measure...
... if only Goldfinger had considered 007 appealing to Miss Galore's maternal instincts.