[Movie] Thread - Best Bond Villain Edition

Bogart

So who's the best Bond villain? As the new Bond movie opens it's time to settle once and for all who is Bond's best bad guy. The two dozen or so contenders have been whittled down to the top five by a panel of experts, and now it's time to settle this democratically. Top Men only, no henchmen, so no Oddjob, no Xenia Onatopp and no Red Grant, awesome though they all are. Also talk about other movies and stuff if you have to I guess.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld

The head of SPECTRE, Bond's nemesis and most deadly opponent. Loves cats, plots and secret lairs. Later retconned into Bond adoptive brother but that was shit so for this poll consider only the classic Blofeld: Donald Pleasance in a comfy chair stroking a white cat.

Auric Goldfinger

Doesn't want to rule the world, just wants all its gold. Has the coolest henchman and an actually reasonable plan to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox to make his own stock more valuable. Cheats at golf, but is an equal opportunities employer and creates much-needed opportunities for female pilots.

Alec Trevelyan

Ah, 006, I've been expecting you. Your upper-class accent needs a bit of work, but it'll do for now. The mirror image to Bond, a deadly secret agent who can predict his every move.

Francisco Scaramanga

The world's deadliest hitman, Scaramanga has a powerful weapon and charges a million a shot. Is also working on solar power of some kind, a facility which Bond blows up, setting back renewable energy research for decades. Obviously enjoys being a villain enormously, which is endearing.

Le Chiffre

Master poker player, investor of other villain's money, weeps blood, insists on torturing his naked captives personally in sweaty rooms. Cannot believe you have bought Ultramarines to the table you pathetic amateur.

Hahnsoo1

Ernst Stavro Blofeld - the Donald Pleasance one

I, too, love cats, plots, and secret lairs.

Dark Raven X

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

Ah Mr Bond, it appears your hippos might not be as hungry as you claim!

HappylilElf

I don't see an option for Dr. Evil so I'm abstaining from this farcical endeavor.

Rhesus Positive

Alec Trevelyan - his accent occasionally slips but he's doing it for England

"For England, James?"

"No. For me."

Best pre-killing Bond line, narrowly beating out "Do you want to know why?"

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Hugo Drax (kill everyone, repopulate Earth with supermodels) and Karl Stromberg (kill everyone, live under the sea with Carole Munro) only narrowly missed the list. Their plans were magnificent, but they were a bit too like Blofeld to stand out from the pack.

The best henchmen are Oddjob, Red Grant, Xenia Onatopp and Rosa Klebb.

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Rhesus Positive wrote: »

"For England, James?"

"No. For me."

Best pre-killing Bond line, narrowly beating out "Do you want to know why?"

I'm very fond of the gentlemanly way Roger Moore kills Drax. Shoots him with a dart and then opens an airlock before gently pushing him in with a concierge's easy smile. I also liked the truly ruthless murder of Locque in For Your Eyes Only, just hoofing his teetering car down a mountain. Have that, you prick.

matt has a problem

Point of order: Le Chiffre was not a "Bond villain", he was a henchman. A high-level henchman yes, a henchman with some autonomy sure, but still a henchman. Let's look at the facts.

The evil plan, actually two in the movie, the first to short stock and then cause it to plummet by blowing up an airplane, and then to use the money to launder it at poker, was done at the behest of his superiors. He was merely the henchman tasked with carrying them both out, both of which he failed.

His initial failure should have resulted in the standard death of a henchman due to failure, but he prolonged his life using the standard henchman comes up with another idea to redeem himself.

Upon his second failure he resorts to the standard capture of Bond as appeasement, which also fails to impress his superiors, resulting in his death at the hands of his own organization and the reveal of presumed actual Bond villain until the tragic retconning of Specter, Mr. White.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

discrider

Ernst Stavro Blofeld - the Donald Pleasance one

Le Chiffre was not a villain; he was robbed.

Rhesus Positive

Alec Trevelyan - his accent occasionally slips but he's doing it for England

Le Chiffre was the victim

#Justice4LeChiffre

Mild Confusion

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

HappylilElf wrote: »

I don't see an option for Dr. Evil so I'm abstaining from this farcical endeavor.

Same, but I voted Le Chiffre anyhow cause he died scratching Bonds nuts.

Kipling217

Alec Trevelyan - his accent occasionally slips but he's doing it for England

I got to go Alex Trevelyan, just because Brosnan is my favourite Bond, bringing the Franchise back from the dismal 80s Bond movies and Trevelyan for Essentially being Mirror universe Bond. It makes him more threatening somehow. Like he has an army and he has henchmen, but take that away and he is still the equal of Bond. Bloefeld, Goldfinger and Le Chiffre where really not as threatening without their henchmen. Scaramanga was too hung up on being the best assassin to be the global threat Bond deserves. He just wanted to chill on island and occasionally kill people for money. He even lets Bond try to kill him for fun, which is more stupid than telling Bond your plan and leaving him in an easily escapable death trap.

(As for the 80s Bond; Its no surprise that A View to a Kill is the only 80s Bond remembered fondly today. The rest? Generic in their ambitions).

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

In defence of 80's Bond, For Your Eyes Only is bookended by two very silly scenes but is actually a decent, relatively straight spy movie. I'm also fond of both of Dalton's 80's Bond movies.

View To A Kill has a fantastic henchwoman in Grace Jones but Christopher Walken seems strangely subdued. Octopussy is middling range Bond but has a couple of top notch stunt sequences.

matt has a problem

Also, Le Chiffre's attempt to kill Bond was done in an henchmanlike manner. Actual Bond villain attempts are convoluted. Lasers, drowning, trapped in a train that's going to explode in 3 minutes. Never direct. Always the opportunity for escape. Le Chiffre merely attempts to poison Bond, as your standard henchman lacking creative thought would.

Rhesus Positive

Alec Trevelyan - his accent occasionally slips but he's doing it for England

Every new Bond should have to have a debut movie where they hunt down an ex MI6 agent who is an obvious expy for how the previous actor played Bond

discrider

Ernst Stavro Blofeld - the Donald Pleasance one

Le Chiffre never attempted to kill Bond.
He was merely administering justice for drink driving.


Casino Royale convinced me to not watch any of the new Bond movies, unfortunately.
And Chiffre getting robbed, Bond crashing for reasons, and Chiffre getting robbed again was a big part of it.

Kana

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

Regarding Happy Together, it also stars the great, lamented Leslie Cheung, who was one of the first openly queer celebrities in east asian pop culture. Certainly the biggest, for sure. He was a massive Hong Kong pop music star and then went into movies and became an award-winning actor, including two prominent roles playing gay men, in Farewell My Concubine and then Happy Together. He committed suicide in 2003 after a lifelong struggle with depression, and even in the panic of the SARS outbreak at the time tens of thousands of people attended his funeral. There's still a memorial for him every year.

Pailryder

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

Did someone say Gremlins 2?
https://youtu.be/x01l_jMhjVM

Mild Confusion

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

I haven’t seen Gremlins 2 since I was a kid, but I remember laughing when Gizmo-Rambo killed the spider-gremlin with a fire arrow made of a paper clip, rubber band, and a bottle of whiteout lit on fire attached to a pencil.

Yes, that’s in the movie too.

Good times.

Dark Raven X

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

Speaking of Bond poisoning attempts, what the hell is up with Mathis' sinister little moment towards the end of Casino Royale, pouring some powder in a drink and saying "I'm supposed to get you to drink this"?

It's framed as tho he's another Quantum agent finishing the job, but then we learn he's a good guy later, so what was the powder?

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Just some medicine the doctors are giving him. He's going out to visit him and a nurse says well you might as well get him to take this while you're out there. It's not important.

klemming

Dark Raven X wrote: »

Speaking of Bond poisoning attempts, what the hell is up with Mathis' sinister little moment towards the end of Casino Royale, pouring some powder in a drink and saying "I'm supposed to get you to drink this"?

It's framed as tho he's another Quantum agent finishing the job, but then we learn he's a good guy later, so what was the powder?

I assumed just a painkiller.

BloodySloth

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

If scaramanga was in an even slightly better movie, he would be the correct choice. The material just drags him down too much.

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Christopher Lee as a Bond villain is perfect, though. It would have been criminal if he hadn't been a Bond villain at some point.

Who are some great Bond villains we never had? How they never got Willem Dafoe for anything is beyond me. Or Rutger Hauer in his prime. Alan Rickman! Imagine how delicious his expository monologue would have been.

BloodySloth

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Time agnostic, Basil Rathbone could have been fun. I was going to say Peter Lorre would have made an obvious right-hand-man type, but in my brief investigation, he apparently played Le Chiffre in an early TV adaptation, which is wild.

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as the number 1 and 2 of a criminal organisation is a great pick.

Mild Confusion

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

Lena Headey would be a great Bond villain. She knocked it out of the park as the villain in Dredd.

Dark Raven X

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

I really liked this scene with Mr White - his genuine laugh when he realizes how little they know about Quantum/Spectre is really well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TG6R36bkgs

klemming

I liked M's follow up in the mole's apartment:
"When someone says 'We've got people everywhere', you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!"

All in all I'd love Quantum of Solace a hell of a lot more if someone could just edit the whole thing with a steadicam effect like those ones that remove the camera shake when the Enterprise gets shot and everyone has to throw themselves around the room.

Chall

Alec Trevelyan - his accent occasionally slips but he's doing it for England

Dark Raven X wrote: »

I really liked this scene with Mr White - his genuine laugh when he realizes how little they know about Quantum/Spectre is really well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TG6R36bkgs

The best part about Mr. White is that he's the head of Quantum, and in three movies but only about 10 minutes of total screen time, and he gets shot 3 times in that brief window. It's like of Blofeld showed up at the beginning of each Roger Moore film to just get shot and disappear until the next one.

Kane Red Robe

Bogart wrote: »

Hugo Drax (kill everyone, repopulate Earth with supermodels) and Karl Stromberg (kill everyone, live under the sea with Carole Munro) only narrowly missed the list. Their plans were magnificent, but they were a bit too like Blofeld to stand out from the pack.

The best henchmen are Oddjob, Red Grant, Xenia Onatopp and Rosa Klebb.

Jaws is one of the greatest henchmen of all time, just saying.

Bogart

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Jaws is great but he's heaved over the line into comic relief. He starts out kind of terrifying, just this huge, unstoppable mountain of a man, but by the end of the movie, especially Moonraker, he's a cartoon character.

Oddjob and Red Grant just stay scary. Oddjob believably no-sells everything Sean Connery throws at him and Red Grant is sadistic and brutal. It helps having a genuinely great actor like Shaw in the part.

Mild Confusion

Le Chiffre - just pop your clothes over there and take a seat, please

I liked Richard Kiel (Jaws’ actor) in Happy Gilmore, he’s pretty funny if you let him have fun with it.

Beyond Normal

I feel like y'all have never even seen the cinematic masterpiece that is Moonraker.

BloodySloth

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

I haven't seen the cinematic masterpiece that is Moonraker, no. I did see the Moonraker that had James Bond in it, though.

Beyond Normal

BloodySloth wrote: »

I haven't seen the cinematic masterpiece that is Moonraker, no. I did see the Moonraker that had James Bond in it, though.

Oh, so you have seen it. It was one of my favorite Bond movies, as a child, because of all the space lazors and stuff. I watched it again as an adult and, well, I was just a dumb kid.

BloodySloth

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

There's something to be said for the idea of "let's do a James Bond scuba battle but in space," and while jaws' arc is lunacy, it's definitely memorable. I've forgotten a lot of James Bond, but you can't forget that.

Commander Zoom

Bogart wrote: »

Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as the number 1 and 2 of a criminal organisation is a great pick.

Expies of them were the mobster bad guys in the first holodeck (malfunction) episode of TNG, "The Big Goodbye".

Drez

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Hey so I'm seeing James Bond: No Time To Dry today in IMAX and I realize right now I don't rememeber anything from SPECTRUMs except the following two little things:

James Bond calls Blofeld an "Inglourious Basterds" [sic] and blue is somehow the warmest colour or something.

Do I need to recall anything from SPECTRUMs to understand No Time To Dry?

Also I don't get the title. Something to do with the beach?

Hahnsoo1

Ernst Stavro Blofeld - the Donald Pleasance one

Drez wrote: »

Hey so I'm seeing James Bond: No Time To Dry today in IMAX and I realize right now I don't rememeber anything from SPECTRUMs except the following two little things:

James Bond calls Blofeld an "Inglourious Basterds" [sic] and blue is somehow the warmest colour or something.

Do I need to recall anything from SPECTRUMs to understand No Time To Dry?

Also I don't get the title. Something to do with the beach?

Oh, that's an easy mistake. It's actually "No Time to Dye". James Bond is having trouble with coloring out the grey in his hair.

Drez

Auric Goldfinger - doesn't expect you to talk

Oh I remember one more thing from SPECTRUMs:

Blofield says something to Bond like "you're my long lost bother" which I don't fully understand. I guess he's saying that Bond has long been a thorn in SPECTRUM's side, very much a "bother" but I don't get the "long lost" part. Or don't remember at least.