Free Form Friday: Bottom 10 Worst James Bond Villians
Free Form Friday is my weekly non-Bowie post. For more David Bowie, come back tomorrow for an exclusive video interview with U Penn Professor Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor to Rolling Stone who, among other things, teaches a course on Bowie. The week after that come back for an exclusive interview with author Sean Eagan, who edited Bowie on Bowie, a collection of interviews. Sean has also authored The Secret History of James Bond which got me thinking about Bond movies. What follows is meant to be funny. But hey, if you don’t like it, I’ll be back to Bowie tomorrow!
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The James Bond movie series has produced some of the most memorable villains in cinema history. Dr. No, Goldfinger, Oddjob, Jaws—- these are villains known to people who haven’t even seen their movies. It’s no wonder world-class actors like Christopher Lee and Christopher Walken agreed to take on such roles. Nonetheless, among the long list of memorable and even iconic movie villains, the series has produced some stinkers, too. Now the bad bad guys who follow don’t all fail as characters for the same reasons, but regardless, these are the worst of the worst:
10. Ronald Rich as Hans in You Only Live Twice. Huge, dressed in all-black and keeper to the keys to the piranha tank, this guy should have been more of a challenge for Bond. His looming presence at Blofeld’s side hints at a climactic battle, but in the end Bond simply flips him into the water with the piranhas. This is especially disappointing following Bond’s earlier fight with a Japanese thug in which the two of them use everything they can get ahold of as weapons including a Samuri sword, a sculpture and even a couch. That’s actually one of my favorite fight scenes in any Bond movie, so the battle with Hans should have been even better. Instead, it’s so forgettable that the character’s name doesn’t even appear in the credits.
9. Bruce Glover and Putter Smith as Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever. I always thought that these two phsyically unimposing assassins were creepy in that they seem to be pretty innocuous, probably like real assassins. Nobody suspects them, which is more realistic than someone like Jaws or Oddjob. They make this list because they embody the worst gay stereotypes of the period. That they are gay is supposed to be part of what makes them wicked. Their deaths involve gay “jokes” (the one takes a low blow, and the other is set on fire– literally flaming). And neither is seen with a gun, which on the one hand adds to their creepiness but on the other probably had something to do with the use of guns as phallic symbols in the series.
8. Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die. Perhaps better known for his 7-Up commercials, Holder’s character in this movie appears to be a genuine evil spirit. Live and Let Die has a lot of problems, not the least of which is its almost comically overt racism. There shouldn’t be room for that in a James Bond movie, but sadly only the degree, not the sentiment is really surprising. But magic doesn’t comport at all. There’s a scene in which it appears that Bond exposes Samedi as a hoax, but the movie’s final shot leaves no doubt that the character is a supernatural entity.
7. Goldie as Mr. Bullion in The World is Not Enough. Is his name “Bull” as it appears in the credits or “Mr. Bullion,” as he’s actually called in the movie? It doesn’t matter because either way he’s forgettable, except for his gold-capped teeth (which are real). The teeth make him the second-best known Bond villain with a creative dentist, but while Jaws used his, well, jaws, to kill people and bite through anything (including a shark), all Mr. Bullion can do is smile and get killed.
6. Telly Savalas as Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Telly Savalas could have found a good home in the James Bond series, but this role was just a bad casting choice. This version of Blofeld comes off more like a gangster than an international supervillain. The part could have been written as a gritty, more realistic criminal, but instead he’s the mastermind of a bizarre plot involving hypnotized pretty girls who are talked out of allergies while they’re asleep. As goofy as that seems as a written description, the psychedelic scene in which one of the hypnotized girls is told how much she loves chicken by a recording of Blofeld’s voice is ridiculous. Add to that, this Blofeld doesn’t immediately recognize Bond, who he met in the last movie, because Bond is wearing fake glasses and speaks with an altered voice. We know this is why Blofeld is duped because he later tells Bond that the clever disguise wasn’t enough to fool him. It just took the entire middle act to get to that point. Hey, he’s bald, is thrown off by fake glasses… maybe Blofeld is Lex Luthor?
5. Anthony Dawson as Professor Dent in Dr. No. I don’t know what’s more confusing– why Dr. No felt the need to employ an evil geologist, or why he sent a geologist to kill James Bond. OK– third mystery– why, after Bond fended off two assassination attempts, did Dr. No instruct Professor Dent to kill him with a tarantula? To make it seem like an accident? Dent is just not very good at his job, but Dr. No keeps sending him back until he finally decides to do what he should have done all along– show up and shoot Bond, you know, with a gun. The only problem is that Bond figured it all out by this point in the movie and straight-up murders Dent. He should have stuck to evil geology.
4. Rick Yun as Zao in Die Another Day. This is a fairly goofy movie overall and includes a minor villain with the unimaginative name of Mr. Kil. But Zao makes the list because his face is encrusted with diamonds. Yeah, there was an explosion and diamonds shot into his face and…he just can’t get them out. Why not? That’s all I can think of when watching this guy. He gets a lot of screen time, too, so we keep having to look at his face. It looks like he can just pick the diamonds out, or that they would just naturally fall out. But no. Eventually, he gets killed by a falling ice chandelier. Get it? Ice? Diamonds? He can’t pull that out of his face, either.
3. Rami Malek as Safin in No Time to Die. OK, Rami Malek is a good actor and the character is creepy enough, but…why did they have him kill off Blofeld? And what’s his overall evil scheme? Yes, yes, we know it’s to program the secret artificial virus to kill off a large number of specific people…but why? In a series that features a lot of convoluted evil plans, this one is the very hardest to follow. The previous movie left Blofeld in jail but very much alive, so upon seeing this movie for the first time everyone was expecting him to be the main villain. Instead, he’s killed off by Safin who just doesn’t seem to be worthy. His actions also lead to the death of… another major character… and he’s not worthy of that, either.
2. Big Ron Tarr in A View to A Kill. Big Ron Tarr isn’t the character’s name, it’s the actor’s name. The character doesn’t get a name, even in the credits, where he appears as “Guard #1.” He does, however make for the most embarrassing of all Bond fight-scenes. Roger Moore was 57 when filming the movie and all I can say is that I hope I don’t look as old and worn out in a year and a half from the time I’m writing this, when I turn 57 myself. It would have been totally unrealistic for Bond to have gone toe to toe with, say, the Dolph Lundgren of 1985 (he has a small role in the movie, but doesn’t fight Bond). Instead, Bond gets to fight a couple of generic guards including one played by Tarr, a grey-bearded fat guy dressed to go boar hunting in the Black Forest. Bond has trouble hurting him, too, but ends up besting his foe with a machine that packs and wraps boxes on a conveyer belt. Possibly the worst individual moment in any Bond film: old man Bond hits Tarr, who responds with an intimidating stare and growl, like he wasn’t phased at all. The same type of response made Oddjob seem indestructible, but in this movie merely made Bond look weak.
1. Joe Don Baker as Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights. I would have liked to have topped this list with a surprising pick like Rami Malek or an unintentionally funny selection like Big Ron Tarr, but that just wouldn’t have been honest. Joe Don Baker as Brad Whitaker is the worst. Whitaker is a West Point dropout who became an international arms dealer with a military fetish. He plays with toy soldiers, wears a fake uniform and makes his henchmen act like they are in an actual army. He’s an out-of-shape, oafish phony who eventually goes after Bond with a big gun that looks like a toy. What’s his plot? To make a drug deal with an Afghan Warlord in order to finance his illegal arms business. Along the way in this movie the Mujahedeen (the predecessors of the Taliban) are established as the good guys, yet the film paradoxically bends over backwards not to make the actual Soviets bad guys. So, not only does the movie’s scale seem way too small for Bond, but it terribly misread the direction history was headed in. Joe Don Baker would return to Bondworld as a completely different character, a CIA officer, in two more movies, as if the franchise wanted to forget Whitaker ever existed.