9 Terrible Movie Deaths That Ruined Great Villains

4. Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big €“ Live And Let Die (1973)

The main antagonist of Roger Moore€™s first outing as James Bond, drug baron and Caribbean dictator Dr. Kananga (aka Mr. Big), is not only a crime boss with close ties to street gangs on the mainland USA, but is also a sovereign ruler of a foreign country with diplomatic immunity. This Bond villain€™s evil scheme centres around flooding the US black market with his heroin, distributed free in an effort to put all other drug dealers out of business. He believes that in doing so, he can double the market for heroin €“ the addicts themselves €“ who would find him the only game in town when they needed their next fix. It€™s basic economics, but a new and novel approach to villainy for a Bond movie, which was more used to the €˜megalomaniacal terrorist supervillain€™ approach to world domination. Sadly, Kananga would prove himself to be no smarter than any of the other men of power who€™d captured Bond and his main squeeze in the past, and tried to feed them both to his sharks instead of, you know, shooting them in the face and disappearing their bodies. Naturally Bond breaks free and engages Mr. Big in close quarters, forcing him to swallow a compressed air pellet, which goes off inside him€ inflating the man like an unconvincing balloon, causing him to fly off and literally explode. It€™s utterly ridiculous, and would be an unfit death for a minor henchman, never mind the criminal mastermind behind such a plot. There were sharks right there. Right there in the pool. Feeding Kananga to the sharks makes so much more sense, and it has the advantage of being exactly what he€™d threatened to do to them€ plus there was no real way that Bond could be sure that the compressed air would react like that, or cause Kananga any problems at all. Had it not, 007 would have looked like a right plum.