A recurring Fatal Flaw of many villains in the James Bond franchise is their refusal to just kill 007 in an easy, convenient, or practical way. It's gotten so ubiquitous that the franchise has become the Trope Namer of villains holding the Idiot Ball in this manner, as it's known on this wiki as Bond Villain Stupidity. They tend to gloat about their Evil Plans, but by then, Bond has already cooked up a plan B to escape and defeat them.
Empire
listed the Bond Villain Monologues, while stating on all "What he should have done: Shot Him", save Tomorrow Never Dies. There, the villain should have "Bought Google."
Films (by order of release date):
- Dr. No:
- After a dinner goes wrong, Dr. No orders his guards to beat Bond up and imprison him. Bond naturally escapes. Arguably justified in that this was the first Bond film, so nobody who didn't read the books would have known how skilled he could be.
- In the book, Dr. No also had Bond run through his death course. Bond was close to dying through it, multiple times. As did everyone else Dr. No had "tested"; the course was designed to kill. The only difference Dr. No ever expected was how long it would take. Funny how much difference a stolen lighter and a steak knife (and Bond!) can make...
- In From Russia with Love, Red Grant's plan is to just shoot Bond, and he actually manages to get the drop on his target and have him completely at his mercy, but he still fails because he can't resist indulging in some Evil Gloating and a Just Between You and Me speech. In Red's defense, he still would have been fine if he hadn't fallen for Bond's bribe. At least he didn't leave the guy unattended, unlike most of the jokers on this list.
- He'd also had plenty of opportunities to kill Bond before he even got on the train, but his failure to do so was his superior's fault: Red's boss' boss (Blofeld in the movie, General G in the novel) didn't just want Bond to die, he wanted him to die in a manner that would embarrass MI6 and the British government, which required a more elaborate setup than just shooting him as he walked down the street.
- Goldfinger:
- Double Subverted. Audric Goldfinger was originally going to just have Bond sliced in half by a laser. However, after moments from loosing his manhood, Bond himself points out that if he dies, then the Secret Service will just send in some guy called 008 with knowledge of Operation Grand Slam that Goldfinger has been plotting. Despite the latter being a bluff as Bond only knows the name of the operation, the risk of him knowing more makes Goldfinger decide instead to keep Bond alive and trick his superiors into thinking Bond has the situation well in hand. This works, and Goldfinger's plan probably would have succeeded if Bond hadn't used the opportunity to charm Pussy Galore.
- In the same film, however, Goldfinger plays the trope straight in dealing with his gangster accomplices. While he is showing them his plan with an elaborate miniature Fort Knox, one gangster demands to leave and take his gold with him. They load the gold in a car and Oddjob drives him away, ostensibly to the airport. Oddjob kills him as soon as the gangster notices they aren't heading to the airport. Instead of just dumping the body, however he takes the car, with the body in it, to an auto yard where it is cubed. He then returns to the farm where Goldfinger says they will have to extract the gold from the car. The kicker is that, after that gangster left, Goldfinger had the room sealed and all the other gangsters gassed to death anyway. So why not just excuse himself for a minute, leaving that one guy with the others and kill them all at once as he had already planned to do, instead of destroying a car for no reason (and even then, why not just take the gold out of the car before making it a three foot by three foot cube, rather than after)?
- Notably, in the novel, the gangster who opted out of the plan "fell down the stairs" on his way out of the meeting, and the others all agreed to join the plan and were left alive, rather than the elaborate setup from the movie.
- Thunderball:
- Fiona Volpe successfully seduces Bond - not that that's especially difficult to do - and doesn't do a High-Heel–Face Turn, but then monologues about it and generally screws around until Bond escapes, killing her shortly thereafter. Helga Brandt makes almost the exact same mistake a film later, though she's instead killed by her superior for being a moron.
- Big Bad Largo himself provides a classic example. He catches Bond in his pool fighting with one of his men. The mook with him is just about to shoot Bond, but Largo stops him and instead traps Bond in there to be eaten by his sharks. Naturally, Bond uses this to escape.
- In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld's guilty of it at least twice; first, he sends an assassin to kill Bond with an elaborate poison trick while he sleeps... you know, instead of shooting him or dropping a grenade on him or any of the myriad other ways to kill a sleeping guy from roughly the same distance. Later, he catches Bond in his base, and keeps him alive because he wants Bond to witness his success even though he really ought to know better than that by now. He even pulls an elaborate fakeout where he seems like he's about to shoot Bond, but shoots his own henchman instead at the last second. A little while after that, he finally tries to shoot Bond for real, but of course by then it's too late with Tiger Tanaka stopping him with a well-aimed shuriken.
- Justified in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where for once Blofeld actually has a sensible reason for keeping the captured 007 alive and explaining the plot to him: Bond, as a government agent, would be an external witness to his activities to verify his claims that he can actually release a "Virus Omega", and is not merely bluffing.
- In Diamonds Are Forever, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd had Bond unconscious and they simply dumped him in an unfinished pipeline and left, assuming he'd eventually die. Doubly stupid, as this was the second time the pair had been given an unconscious James Bond to dispose of; the first time they tried to burn him alive, which admittedly would have worked as he was only saved by other villains.
- Most of Live and Let Die revolves around this, as the villains sequentially attempt an elaborate assassination involving a snake (despite having keys to his room), leave him unattended on a small island to be eaten by alligators, and finally try to have him fed to sharks - admittedly a classic - instead of just shooting him, despite by then having had enough experience with the guy to know better.
- The Man with the Golden Gun:
- Bond takes up Hai Fat's invitation to join him for dinner in his mansion while pretending to be Francisco Scaramanga, not knowing that the real Scaramanga had already gotten in touch with the guy. When he arrives there late at night, he's incapacitated by some guards in an ambush. As they're about to kill him, Hai Fat forbids them from doing so because he doesn't want Bond killed in his home. They'll just take him somewhere else to finish him off, right? Nope. Hai Fat has Bond placed in a krabi krabong school to... get beaten up. Scaramanga rightfully ridicules Hai Fat's thinking before killing him.
- Justifiably invoked by Scaramanga late in the film; he freely admits that he could have used his solar-powered laser to blow up Bond's plane before he even landed on the island, but chose not to do so because of how unsatisfying it would be. Scaramanga would like nothing better than to engage in "a duel between titans" with 007 himself. Scaramanga is such an expert killer that he really desires a Self-Imposed Challenge, even allowing his minion Nick-Nack to send other assassins after him when he least expects it.
- The Spy Who Loved Me: Karl Stromberg orders his soldiers to take Bond to imprisoned with the American, British, and Soviet submariners while he leaves with Major Anya Amasova, instead of simply shooting them. Bond easily escapes and he frees the submariners and they fight back against their captors, eventually foiling Stromberg's hopes of instigating WWIII. Later, as Bond makes it to Atlantis to stop Stromberg and save Anya, Stromberg first tries to send Bond down a booby-trapped elevator into his shark tank, but Bond manages to avoid the trap. Later, Stromberg finally tries to shoot Bond himself with a special gun hidden beneath his dining table, and again, Bond avoids the attack and he finishes off Stromberg himself.
- For Your Eyes Only:
- In The Teaser, "Blofeld" opts to toy with Bond in the helicopter, instead of just crashing it as soon as he takes control. Justified in this case by the fact that "Blofeld" had looked forward to killing Bond for a long time and had been crippled by him - he wanted Bond to suffer.
- The main villain is guilty of it as well, choosing to kill Bond and the Bond Girl by dragging them behind his boat and assuming sharks ate them when they finally disappeared as opposed to shooting them before throwing them overboard and then using the sharks to dispose of the evidence.
- Octopussy:
- Averted earlier in the film: After learning Bond has escaped from his palace, Kamal Khan goes on a literal manhunt after him, and he almost succeeds before Bond gets away with some tourists that happened to be passing by.
- Downplayed later on, when General Orlov and Kamal have snuck a nuclear warhead into an US Air Force base in West Germany and have set it to detonate. After Kamal and Gobinda have left, they see Bond hurriedly driving to the base to try to prevent it from detonating. However, they let him him go since the German police are pursuing him, thus believing he'd fail to make it there in time. And considering what they need to get away from, they're completely justified in wanting to run for it no matter what.
- A View to a Kill:
- Early on, Zorin decides to kill Bond by rolling his car into a lake, presumably to Make It Look Like an Accident. Downplayed, though, as Zorin does try to get it done while James is still unconscious and even stays at the lake long enough to make sure James couldn't have survived (James does survive by spotting that Zorin was watching and using the air from the tire to stay underwater until Zorin left). That doesn't, however, justify Zorin not killing Bond before dumping him in the car, in the same manner as the agent who had posed as Bond's driver. Lastly, he would have probably failed to Make It Look Like an Accident anyway since he had plopped Bond's driver in the back seat right next to Bond rather than at the wheel.
- Later, Zorin has Bond at his mercy but decides to kill him by locking him in a museum and setting it on fire. Justified, however, in that he wants to frame Bond for the murder of someone else and make it look like he failed to escape after setting the museum on fire himself.
- Averted in The Living Daylights, where General Whittaker's whole plan hinges on Bond killing someone on his say so and his own ability to look like the victim or hero. He also deliberately monologued to distract Bond as a remote control gun was aiming to shoot him. Whittaker does miss a good opportunity to kill Bond late in the film, but it's because he thinks sending Bond to jail will be better for his cover - which he'd be right about, if Bond hadn't already outsmarted him a few scenes before.
- Averted in Licence to Kill, where Franz Sanchez does ensure Bond is sliding towards the shredder and only leaves because the factory's blowing up around him. Even then, a henchman stays to finish the job, and the only reason Bond survives is the unforeseeable intervention of his companion.
- In GoldenEye, the villains have several opportunities to just shoot Bond and don't. Then Ouroumov has the chance to shoot Bond, announces that he is about to do it, and then is promptly cold-cocked. What moves this into beyond-belief territory is that both have direct evidence of how dangerous he is when cornered. The only such opportunity that has a justified reason for not killing him is in the Statue yard, where Trevelyan is trying to frame Bond and Natalya for the theft of the helicopter. If a post-explosion examination of the bodies revealed that they had been shot beforehand, it would have raised suspicion. Also, given Trevelyan's motivations, it's not merely enough to kill Bond, and if it would be he usually has more pragmatic reasons for keeping them alive. The aforementioned frame-up is just the first such example.
- Elliot Carver was preparing to do this in Tomorrow Never Dies, leaving Mr. Stamper and his henchmen to torture Bond and Wai Lin for an ungodly number of hours before letting them die, but the heroes decide to make their escape before Carver even leaves the room.
- Zig-zagged by Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough. For most of the film, she averts the trope in that her aim is to seduce Bond into becoming her new Renard, rather than to kill him. When she does decide to kill Bond, however, she straps him to a torture chair that will slowly apply pressure to the back of his neck until it snaps. She is, admittedly, about five seconds away from succeeding when Zukozsky intervenes, but she would have succeeded if she hadn't stopped to gloat between each turn of the screw. What truly moves this into "stupidity" territory is that when Zukovsky arrives, she pulls out a gun and shoots him, then instead of shooting Bond too, she drops the gun in front of him and runs away, in the delusional belief that he wouldn't shoot a previous lover. Even after she tried to kill him not ten seconds ago. This ends about as well for Elektra as you'd expect.
- It's either lampshaded or a spectacularly bad example, albeit not involving Bond himself: in Die Another Day, two henchmen have Jinx at their mercy, and one actually proposes shooting her... but the other one wants to do it with lasers, and gets his way, allowing Bond time to arrive and rescue her.
- Earlier in the film, Bond gets out a bulletproof vest, and Colonel Moon keeps shooting it until it falls off into the ground.
- In Casino Royale (2006) Mr. White makes a dumb and wholly unnecessary deal to keep Bond alive. It ends poorly for him in Spectre.
- Not quite averted in Quantum of Solace, as while the villains never really have Bond at their mercy the way they usually do at least once a movie, they do, however, leave the oft-imperiled Bond girl alive way too many times, and she ends up having as much to do with their downfall as 007 does.
- Raoul Silva in Skyfall initially toys with Bond instead of killing him because it's all part of his plan to get caught so he can exact revenge on M. Later, however, his failure to take advantage of various opportunities to kill the heroes after said plan has already run its course is best chalked up to Plot Armor and Sanity Has Advantages.
- Crops up several times in Spectre. Big Bad Oberhauser's petty desire to sadistically torment and relish in Bond's suffering due to their Cain and Abel relationship leads to his downfall.
- First, when he has Bond at his mercy in his secret base, he just decided to go all Evil Gloating and Break the Badass on both Bond and the Bond Girl, and then he'd get to killing Bond after the Cold-Blooded Torture instead of instantaneously killing 007. This gives 007 ample time to bail out and conjure a plan to take down Oberhauser and C.
- The second time, he constructs an elaborate Death Trap, giving Bond a Sadistic Choice: escape now on your own but live with the guilt of not saving Madeleine Swann in time for the rest of your life, or try to rescue Swann and die together. Bond Takes a Third Option, and he not only manages to save Swann in the nick of time, he also gives chase to Blofeld and has him arrested for his crimes. In this case, Oberhauser was playing on Bond's feelings to get him to fall, but since he was more interested in tormenting Bond rather than killing him, this gave Bond plenty of time to find Swann and then escape.
- Oberhauser's henchmen aren't too bright either. When they kidnap Bond, they tie his hands in front of him, with plastic zip ties. Sure enough, Bond is able to grab one of their guns and shoot them both, then break free.
- C/Max Denbigh himself is guilty of this, as he had many chances to kill M so he won't hinder his Evil Plan to seize control of the world's intelligence agencies and forward the collected intel to SPECTRE, but opts to go for Break Them by Talking near the climax. He also fails to realize that M managed to do a sweep of his office and empty his gun before C gets there, being that M is a former field agent unlike C, who's more of a corrupt paper-shuffler. He finally tries to kill M, but M manages to grab C's gun and send him down a Disney Villain Death.
- No Time to Die:
- No-Nonsense Nemesis Safin averts the trope in its entirety. By acting like a pragmatic, logical and underhanded villain, unburdened by ego or theatrics, he's ultimately able to accomplish what no other villain in the series' history could ever do: successfully kill James Bond.
- Spectre, on the other hand, plays it straight. With their Complexity Addiction on full display, Spectre's operatives all assemble in a single location in Cuba and lure Bond there with the intent of watching him be dramatically executed in a demonstration of experimental nanomachine technology coded to 007's DNA. However, Safin and Dr. Valdo Obruchev hijack it to instead target all the Spectre agents, leading to them dying en masse while Bond is unharmed. This destroys the entire organization.
- Ever since his family was murdered on Oberhauser/Blofeld's orders, Safin is aware that the man is an egomaniac who loves to torture his enemies sadistically. Safin indirectly gets his revenge against Blofeld by having him get infected with the nanomachines that are coded to Bond's DNA.
Other media:
- The Animated Adaptation James Bond Jr., if anything, had this problem even worse because of being a kids' cartoon. With 65 episodes and half a dozen novellas, there's far too many examples to list in detail, but for instance "The Heart Break Caper" had the villains tie James Jr. and his friends to a support beam and leave them to be scalded to death with a blast of steam. As soon as they're alone, James Jr. starts cutting his way free with a miniature buzzsaw in his Gadget Watch.
