10 Incredible Movies With TERRIBLE Villains

It's not a surprise that many iconic movies happen to have some of the greatest villains ever put to screen. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. The Joker in The Dark Knight. Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.

These characters are at the epicentre of the story's conflict, so it's important they are fleshed out, entertaining, and memorable. After all, a lame baddie can ruin an otherwise perfect movie.

But that isn't always the case. There have been thrillers, dramas, and comedies that managed to become classics, despite having an adversary that's derivative, one-dimensional, or boring. (The best Marvel instalments suffered this problem for the longest time.) 

Even if the villain is well-written, they can be let down by the actor's performance. Sometimes, the big bad's backstory or motivation is paper-thin, to the point where the most talented actor struggles to salvage it. Other times, the evildoer appears too infrequently to make an impact.

Fortunately, the entries on this list turned out so well, they weren't tainted by the mediocre antagonists. Nevertheless, it's a shame to these beloved films didn't have a better villain.

Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi flick centres around an extra-terrestrial spaceship that becomes stranded in South Africa for decades, causing unrest across the nation. When a government agent called Wikus (Sharlto Cooper) is exposed to the aliens' biotechnology, he begins to mutate, turning him into Public Enemy #1. Out of desperation, Wikus teams up with the aliens (derogatorily called "Prawns"), to help them return to their homeworld. 

Even though Wikus has many adversaries, nobody is a bigger pain in the ass than Colonel Koobus Venter (David James). Being passionately xenophobic towards the Prawns, Venter is more than happy to eliminate Wikus and his allies.

Although Venter is supposed to be scary, his generic manner and appearance makes it tough to remember his name or what he looks like, even after watching District 9 multiple times. So little is revealed about Venter, he comes across as a mindless grunt rather than the overarching antagonist. When Wikus kills all the enemy soldiers, it feels like Venter became the main baddie by default, purely because he was the only one left alive.

Though Venter's demise during the showdown should be satisfying, it was hard to feel anything since next to nothing was revealed about him.