20 Secret Movie Villains EVERYONE Saw Coming
15. James Costa - Taking Lives
2004's psychological thriller Taking Lives was largely rubbished by critics for, among other things, being immensely predictable.
The plot follows FBI profiler Illeana Scott (Angelina Jolie) as she leads the hunt for an elusive serial killer, Martin Asher, who assumes the identity of his victims.
The film opens with a 1983-set prologue where a teenage Asher is portrayed by Paul Dano, before the story leaps forward 21 years to the present day.
From this it's fair to deduce that Asher is now a man in his mid-to-late thirties, and while there are admittedly a few name actors in the cast who fit that bill - such as Kiefer Sutherland and Olivier Martinez - it's simply far more on-brand for a thriller of this ilk to make the secret killer Scott's love interest, James Costa (Ethan Hawke).
Even accepting that the serial killer role was something of an against-type casting for Hawke at the time, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense for an actor of his profile and caliber to be playing anything but the villain - and that he was.
For his own part, Hawke called Taking Lives "terrible" in a 2011 interview.