Action Movie Villains Who Actually Made A Good Point

When Special Agent Stanley Goodspeed and former SAS Captain Mason are recruited to take down a group of rogue Marines outfitted with 15 VX gas-loaded M55 rockets located on Alcatraz, they're told the Marines are a threat to everyone on the planet. With those rockets, they could take out anyone anywhere and create an international incident from which the world would never recover.

That may be true, but General Hummel (the leader of the rogue squadron) isn't just pointing rockets at the country so he can get his rocks off. He's carrying out this Bond villain-esque plan to make the American government pay for the military casualties that it often turns a blind eye toward.

Hummel isn't just trying to squeeze $100 million out of a military slush fund; he wants the US government to recognize the bravery of servicemen who take on thankless and dangerous jobs. It's not ideal that he's trying to get the government to do so under the threat of aggression, but he has a point.

When Marko Ramius is handed the keys to Red October, a Soviet sub with sonar cloaking capabilities, he realizes it's going to be used to carry out an unprovoked nuclear onslaught against the United States, pushing America to start WWIII without proof that Russia has done anything. Rather than help destroy the world, he decides to defect with the sub.

As noble as Ramius's decision is, it creates an issue for the Soviet military. That's where Captain Tupolev, the captain of the Konovalov comes into play. He's really just doing his job when he carries out his plan to destroy the Red October and take out Ramius in the process. From his point of view, he's got to do everything he can to stop one of the most decorated officers in the Soviet Union from defecting to the enemy with a one-of-a-kind piece of technology.

If the nationalities were reversed, and Tupolev was an American agent stopping a US soldier from defecting to Russia, he would be the hero of the film.

Nuclear scientist Otto Octavius isn't just some robotic tentacle arm-wearing baddie. In the first act of the film, he's close to creating an artificial sun that would be able to provide renewable energy to everyone on the planet. Unfortunately, after the fusion reactor he uses to make the artificial sun explodes and terminates his wife, he focuses his brilliance on ridding New York City of Spider-Man.

Doc Ock's brain is a little rattled by the demise of his wife and the blast of experimental energy that he suffers through, but it makes sense that he wants to get rid of Spider-Man so he can get back to creating renewable energy for the planet. Could he just go about his experiments without trying to harm the one superhero who has bills to pay? Absolutely, but that's just not his way.

For all of his puns about ice and chilling out, Mr. Freeze isn't just some themed baddie who wants to take down the Bat. The only reason he got into the whole supervillain game was to get the materials to create a cure for MacGregor Syndrome, a rare degenerative disorder. While researching the disease, Fries suffered a mishap that made him unable to survive at normal temperatures, thus his need for diamonds to power his cold technology.

Does he need to freeze the entire city to do his work? Definitely not. But he's not just freezing random people for the heck of it. Freeze needs time and space to work on a cure for MacGregor's Syndrome - and what better way to do that than by turning the city into a frozen wasteland?

For all of his bluster and desire to take Wakanda by the throat while irreparably changing its foreign policy, Erik Killmonger has a point about the way the isolationist country has been running itself for hundreds of years. Not only is Wakanda the one place on Earth where Vibranium is plentiful, but it's controlled by a single royal family, which is a little sketchy even if they're a beloved group of people.

There's no simple way to look at Wakanda's decision to remain a secretive and pacifist nation. History has shown that African nations are used for their resources and left to suffer once they're deemed no longer useful, so of course Wakanda wants to keep to itself, but Killmonger's belief that the country should use its extreme wealth to help the Black community makes sense.

In a perfect world, Killmonger and T'Challa should be able to find a middle ground between their two disparate world views. Regardless of how much T'Challa wants Wakanda to remain an isolationist nation, it's Killmonger that brings the country to the global stage with his brash flaunting of Wakanda's old ways.

Ra's al Ghul's whole deal is he wants to destroy Gotham because it's a city that's essentially run by crooks. He believes that not only is it beyond saving, but its citizens are also just as worthless as Gotham itself.

Does it make sense to completely destroy a city and all of its inhabitants? Absolutely not. That's psychotic, but the sequels to Batman Begins don't exactly prove him wrong. By saving Gotham from Ghul, whackos like the Joker and Bane aren't just able to run roughshod over the city, but their existence is normalized.

There's a belief that the destruction of Rome, as awful as it was for its inhabitants, was actually beneficial in the long run. We'll never know if Ghul's plan to destroy Gotham would have brought a new golden age to Earth.