11 Heroic Acts In Movies That Changed Absolutely Nothing

8. Clarice Stops A Serial Killer... By Helping A Serial Killer Escape - The Silence Of The Lambs

Clarice Starling is the poster-girl for achievement through perseverance, and the adoption of unconventional methods to capture predators. She should also have probably been struck off for her part in accidentally helping a serial killer escape and murder two police officers (and presumably some more unseen victims), and then doing it again in the sequel, while fostering some worrying implied sexual feelings towards him.

But she does take down Buffalo Bill without much help (other than the sometimes useful hints of Lecter), and saves his last victim from becoming a sleeve on his lady suit, so maybe we can forgive her the other transgressions? Nope. Buffalo Bill might be off the streets, but in the bigger picture, he's only half the monster that Hannibal Lecter is anyway. So while it might seem that Clarice's score is back to zero, since she stopped one killer, and then all but guaranteed that another would escape, it's all about the quality of the killer.

Lecter makes Bill look like the amateur he is: Bill is impulsive, emotional, and his capture is inevitable, because he's not as smart as he thinks he is, whereas Lecter is basically the devil. Having three Bills active and killing is still better than having Lecter on the loose, so in the grand scheme of things, Clarice's big case did very little to redress the balance of justice.