The Perfect Villain

Last night I got lost in one of my random thoughts and now I'm writing it here. I watch a lot of movies and I've found that more often than not it's not the hero that makes the movie but the villain. If you have someone truly diabolic it's worth watching. I started thinking about, what makes the perfect villain? My immediate thought was, intelligence. If you have some mindless quack job running around it's fairly easy to take them down. The intelligent villain is much more tricky. There have been two villains that have really stood out to me amongst the others.

The first I'm going to talk about is The Joker. Not the Jack Nicholson Joker but the Heath Ledger Joker. The new Batman movies have been amazing. They've finally gotten back to what Batman is really supposed to be like. This Joker was a real reflection of the dark and gritty atmosphere that Batman is supposed to have. That role was truly the performance of his life. The great thing about this character is he had a perfect balance of madness and logic to make the ultimate villain. I will never ever forget his "plan" speech. It was an excellent speech and the scariest thing about it was... it was true. It was all dead on.

Next, and this is the one that has had my attention for years, is Hannibal Lector. First off, cannibalism is creepy. Right there they had him set up to be the perfect villain. Hannibal had intelligence that was off the charts. He was a psychologist so more often than not he knew his victims and their habits better than they did. I loved how well he was able to get inside some one's head. If you haven't seen Silence of the Lambs you need to see it. In my opinion, Hannibal Lector is the greatest villain of all time.