Stupid Evil / Live-Action Films

• Aguirre's followers in Aguirre, the Wrath of God betray their commander Ursua and go downstream on the Amazon in search of El Dorado. They all die. Turns out that taking orders from a raving evil lunatic wasn't a very good idea.
• Weyland-Yutani in the Alien series was pretty clearly looking over Umbrella's shoulder in business school (or maybe Umbrella was looking over its shoulder…?). In the first few movies, you could probably brush off their attempts to harness the aliens as simple curiosity, but once you take a look at the EU (prequels and Predator-related stuff included), it quickly becomes clear that Weyland-Yutani's entire corporate strategy is based on xenomorphs. You'd think after the seventh overrun research facility, they'd start looking into something besides an uncontrollable monster with no sane military applications that couldn't be fulfilled by pretty much anything else. In at least one case, they even betrayed their own government in the hopes of nabbing a few. The Dark Horse Comics stories partially justify some of their actions by giving the Xenomorphs psionic abilities that brainwash people into allowing the Xenomorphs to spread, but with W-Y it's a "chicken or egg" question with the same carnage in the end.
• The unnamed serial killer in Angst is profoundly incompetent, thinking out his plans in an extremely incompetent fashion and gets caught within a day of his spree.
• In Attack the Block, Hi-Hatz is the local kingpin who becomes greatly upset about Moses disrespecting him, and he will put a bullet between Moses' eyes to avenge that disrespect even if that means charging into the building full of man-eating aliens and getting his goons (and himself) slaughtered as a result. In his very last scene, he even prioritizes trying to shoot Moses over defending himself from the aliens smashing their way into the apartment through the windows behind him.
• The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Jane Doe. By the end of the movie, Tommy and Austin have figured out that she is alive and sentient and can feel everything done to her, have figured out a large chunk of her history, and even succeed in communicating with her. Then she kills them both, eliminating the two people who could've prevented her from experiencing any further trauma, and thus ensuring she'll most likely go through another agonizing autopsy at the very least before anyone else figures those same things out, provided she doesn't kill them, too.
• Black Lightning (2009): Kuptsov's assassins try to blow the Black Lightning up with a rocket launcher. Retrieving the MacGuffin inside or not getting attention appears to have slipped their mind.
• In Catwoman it's a mystery how Laurel and George Hedare presumably thought no one could possibly connect the extremely distinctive injuries or deaths of numerous people, who'd either just bought or regularly used their cosmetics, back to their company; or that if the truth did emerge they wouldn't be in serious trouble. Their justification is that the worst side effects — aka facial disintegration — only happen if you stop using Beau-Line (their newest product), and they'll just make sure people keep buying it to be certain no one finds that out. Never mind the fact that they can't possibly control the spending habits of every single one of their customers, a lot of whom would naturally seek medical advice about the lesser side effects of the face cream (such as the headaches and fainting spells that eventually land the protagonist's friend in the hospital), their skin gradually losing all sensation and becoming hard to the touch, and their faces melting if they stop using Beau-Line for whatever reason. Laurel even boasts about the cream preventing aging by making skin and flesh as hard as marble, and honestly seems to think that this is something most people would want. Even in the unlikely event that no one died, there would still be a class-action lawsuit the likes of which has never been seen; particularly when any high-profile customers (who'd be able to hire top-notch lawyers) discovered that they were tricked into getting addicted to a product the company knew was dangerous before widespread release... and which they would still have to keep using if they didn't want their faces to be destroyed. In fact, if Patience had just done nothing at all, the regular authorities would still have taken care of everything in quick order.
• Come and See:
  • A Nazi plane dumps boxes of leaflets over Belarus with a curt, blunt demand for Slavs to "kill the Bolshevik kikes." Reading the propaganda, the partisan Rubezh just scratches his head wondering why they would go to such trouble to drop such a stupid message.
  • Nazis in an SS death squad have a ball raping, pillaging and burning a Belarusian village. Drunk with power and stolen schnapps, they drive off on their merry way... and immediately cross paths with partisan resistance fighters, getting themselves slaughtered to a man.
• In Descendants, Maleficent's Villain Song classifies merely undesirable traits like laziness as "evil" and goes on to describe "evil" as an ideal that should be striven for, a way of life. This is presumably why she achieved nothing for 16+ years after her defeat until a total stranger's choices serendipitously dropped a priceless opportunity into her lap.
  Maleficent: But when you're evil, doing less is doing more!
• In The Dirty Dozen, the dozen are proceeding with the infiltration of the German-occupied chateau in France, staffed by dozens of soldiers and generals and more reinforcements waiting nearby. Maggot, the most murderous member of the group, purposely sabotages the mission to take the opportunity to kill a German woman and tries to kill the rest of his team. He even urges the woman to scream in fear, alerting the Germans to his presence.
• The made-for-TV Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness has the evil adventuring party acting like this. At one point, they slay a dragon and the undercover paladin just barely convinces them not to raze the nearby village so they can treat them like heroes instead, and the evil adventurers still murder some of the villagers offering them hospitality for no discernible reason.
• The family in, er, The Family are walking embodiments of this trope. Despite being in witness protection, in fear of their very lives, and despite having left all hope of the mob life behind them ages before, they engage in vicious violence against anyone and everyone who crosses them, no matter what the slight, including beating a slightly late plumber to death with a bat and blowing up a snarky local grocery store with everyone in it.
• In The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, the Sorceress (despite her player claiming to be Chaotic Neutral) has a tendency to incinerate peasants just because The Roleplayer of the party wants to talk to them.
• Glass Onion: Miles Bron is an impulsive idiot who has no problem whatsoever murdering threats to his power the very instant he thinks he can get away with it, even if he is the most obvious suspect afterwards. Ironically, Benoit Blanc is Too Clever by Half and thinks Bron is too obvious a suspect at the beginning, going into a very angry tirade when he finally understands the depths of Bron's idiocy.
• Roderick from Jack the Giant Slayer does a lot of actions just to show what an evil Jerkass he is; he has his sidekick send four soldiers to their death, which in turn leaves the group with barely any rations. And then he goes out of his way to throw another one off a cliff for literally no reason, despite knowing he's in hostile territory and could use the protection until he seized control. It's a bit of a relief when he pans out to just be a Big Bad Wannabe and Fallon reclaims his position.
• In Johnny Mnemonic, an evil pharmaceutical company that doesn't want anyone (even themselves and their own families) to have a cure for a deadly disease that has infected half of the entire world went through all the trouble to spend their resources on creating a working cure just for the sake of having to suppress it. If they didn't want the world to have a cure or risk it slipping into the public's hands, they didn't need to invent it in the first place.
• Jurassic Park's In-Gen Corporation, Bio-Syn Corporation and anybody related to them at an administrative level is composed of pure stupid; starting with cloning the dinosaurs (including the ones that are incredibly lethal — the novel even has Doctor Wu pointing out to Hammond that they could have just gone for the herbivores and mutated them further to make them extra-mellow and still gained a lot of money but Hammond wanted his park to be a "realistic" experience, despite both Wu's and Malcolm's warnings that even a "normal" zoo and animal-themed parks cannot be realistic by their own nature), too blind by seeing what could be done For Science! to think if it was a good idea at all, and then spending multiple movies trying to recoup the monetary loss of all of this whiz-bang going horribly wrong; to the point that by Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom they have gone to full-blown Weyland-Yutani/Umbrella levels of evil and try to sell these incredibly dangerous and unreliable things as military weapons and pets for the ultra-rich.
  • Special mention goes to their Jurassic World-era policies, which had a profitable theme park and seemingly managed to finally shake off the stigma of Hammond's first failure. Nonetheless, they still try to make money on the side with a military contract that involved deliberately creating a psychotic Ax-Crazy dinosaur, which promptly escapes and lays waste to the theme park. Guess they just aren't satisfied if they aren't crashing and burning in the evilest way possible…
  • Jurassic World Dominion sees Bio-Syn finally going full latter-series Umbrella with a plan to create the ultimate source of profit: unleash a swarm of cloned prehistoric locusts that will eat all of the food on Earth that has not been created by Bio-Syn. Dr. Lewis Dodgson expects the company will become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams with this new dominance of the market, but what truly would probably happen would be the literal rest of the world getting more than a little ticked off (assuming they don’t all starve to death first). It says a lot that Dr. Henry Wu, who had spend most of the World trilogy so far playing antisocial Mad Scientist decides that this plan is just going too damn far and helps the heroes stop it.
• Kill Bill:
  • Elle Driver is the most needlessly vindictive person of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, which is saying a lot since Bill tried to kill The Bride for trying to leave the team. Elle needlessly complicates things by killing Pai Mei, even though she was ordered not to, just to provoke The Bride into coming after her. (Well, that and he ripped out her eye. That would make almost anyone want to kill.) The stupidest part, though? Gloating about it to The Bride (who didn't even know about said death until Elle told her) in the middle of their Duel to the Death. It's possible she was trying to psychologically unbalance the Bride. If so, it backfired.
  • Pai Mei himself qualifies. He is an egotistical martial artist without peer and will assault or kill anybody for the slightest offense. This is in fact what led to his death as after he tore out Elle's eye when she insulted him, she killed him by poisoning his food. He was so arrogant he didn't even consider someone could treat him the way he treated others.
• Let Me In: Kenny, the bully who torments the main character Owen. While he is part of a trio who regularly assaults and humiliates Owen, the other two at least have the sense to restrain themselves so they'll get away with it. Kenny, on the other hand, scars Owen's face, threatens to rape and drown him when a teacher was watching, and at the end of the film, Kenny and his brother attack Owen by throwing him in the school swimming pool and planning to either kill him or blind him, with no idea how they were going get away with leaving a dead body or mutilated boy in a public area.
• Ax-Crazy prisoner Hydell in Lockout is pretty much the poster child for this trope, as he tries to rape the damsel or kills multiple people simply For the Evulz no matter what the consequences (although he may not be naturally this stupid, as it is stated that the stasis used to contain prisoners on the station can have detrimental effects on some prisoners' mental states). He undermines his brother Alex's Pragmatic Villainy in taking hostages and keeping technicians alive to keep the space station in orbit just to satisfy his bloodlust, even though it would doom him. Hydell even kills his brother in a moment of anger when he again doesn't allow him to rape Emilie, depleting his own options even further, and then concludes by killing all but one of the hostages.
• Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road has it emphasized many a time that his methods are, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Conspicuous Consumption personified. His Establishing Character Moment is basically him dumping water from a massive underground reservoir onto his subjects, wasting thousands of gallons while lecturing them about how they can't grow dependent on water and wasting it is weakness. In his case, though, his irrational wasting of resources actually makes him even more dangerous; he simply doesn't care if he has to toss aside his vast supply of water, gas, bullets, and lives by the truckload if it means getting what he wants, which is why he's completely comfortable with mobilizing an entire army in the name of getting his wives back.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War Zig-Zags this. When it comes to fighting and scheming, The Mad Titan is as cunning as he is strong and makes creative use of his strength and power against the heroes. However, his goal falls under this trope in light of his motivations. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe for fear that life will snuff itself out if allowed to grow unchecked, as it did on his homeworld. However, the items he plans to use to resolve this, The Infinity Stones, would make him a Reality Warper par excellence. He could easily use them to create an endless supply of resources to preserve life, yet single-mindedly uses them for destruction. There's a reason he's known as the "Mad" Titan, after all, even if he is sick to death of being called that. The creators have stated that he's more of a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist desperately trying to prove that his previous plan could work to the point where it blinded him to all better options. His past self, upon realizing that all his plans will come to nothing as the Avengers will kill his future self and re-create the Infinity Gauntlet using time travel, just drops all pretense and wants to remake the world so people will be forced to be grateful to him.
  • The High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a combination of this and Lethally Stupid. His stated purpose is to create the perfect society from the ground up, but his scientific incompetence and Control Freak and Psychopathic Manchild tendencies make it so that he will never be satisfied. Due to this, all of his experiments eventually end with him completely destroying the results, no matter how wasteful, and he only got away with this for so long because he's the head of a galactic MegaCorp and keeps to his own side of the galaxy away from any prying eyes.
• Mortal Kombat: The Movie: Shang Tsung's strategy for conquering Earth appears to largely depend on this trope; despite tricking Sonya into entering the tournament, which he must win fairly to conquer Earth, he still repeatedly sends henchmen after her to kill her both before she gets there and after she arrives.
• Paparazzi: The titular paparazzi are pretty much all cackling, over-the-top supervillains, but one in particular stands out. After the quartet of paparazzi that serve as the film's villains cause a car wreck that cripples the celebrity protagonist's wife and puts his son in a coma and then proceeds to hound the two for more photographs, the protagonist gets in a motorcycle accident with one of them that leaves him hanging off of a cliff overlooking a fatal drop onto a rocky shore. Despite all the crap they pulled, the protagonist is still willing to pull him up… until he starts bragging about how he's going to ruin his life even more with this accident. Three guesses as to what happens next.
• In Predators, while on the run from the titular alien hunters, Edwin steps on a Bear Trap, so Isabelle helps him walk. Out of nowhere, he stabs her in the back and reveals he's a Serial Killer who has decided to make her his next victim, even though she is his only hope for survival. Fortunately, Royce shows up before he can finish her off, and Edwin is killed when he tries to stab him in the back.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil Film Series:
    • The Umbrella Corporation in the film series seems to live and breathe Stupid Evil. The company's actions are geared entirely towards nothing more than propagating the existence of a deadly, uncontrollable virus that has no discernible practical applications.
    • Particularly by the third film, wherein the whole planet has been reduced to an arid desert by the Zombie Apocalypse (somehow) and money no longer matters to the roving bands of survivors. Yet Umbrella keeps making new strains of the T-Virus to sell to… actually, the films never explain who they hope will buy the damn thing. It could at least be shakily justified in the previous films by concluding that, as in the games, Umbrella planned to sell the virus to bioterrorists, insurrectionists, or even warring nations, but who's left at this point? And even if such parties did still exist, who would want to Take Over the World in its current state? They do explain at one point that they intend to refine the virus so that it can turn those that are already zombies into something resembling domesticated workhorses and stop them from eating people, which makes some sense. However, they are far too incompetent to ever pull that off.
    • In a film series full of evil Umbrella leaders, Dr. Isaacs probably takes the cake in terms of this Trope. His obsession with Alice leads to him disobeying direct orders from Wesker to leave her be and falsifying orders of his own to release (already pretty scarce, both because of general wasting and his lousy experimentation method) resources in order to hunt her down, which leads eventually to the destruction of the only other Umbrella facility in North America (and to not mention constantly cloning Alice and leading the clones into an endless massacre of a Death Course, which not only provides an immense number of cadavers that (being improperly disposed of) leads to the Umbrella facility being surrounded by a humongous swarm of zombies but doesn't really seems to be of any use other than Isaacs' sick amusement). When the original Dr. Isaacs appears in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, he turns out to be both this (because he's the one leading the little plot twist mentioned below) and a Smug Super, to boot. This also gets him killed — he decides to keep his entire focus on Alice without thinking what the clone Isaacs he just told is an Expendable Clone would do as a response to that bombshell being dropped on him.
    • The premise of Resident Evil: Retribution involves Umbrella perfectly recreating sections of major cities in underground facilities, cloning large numbers of humans, and implanting them with false memories of living in a real city — all for the sake of infecting the mini-city with the T-Virus and showing the footage to potential buyers. Not only would all three of the steps taken cost Umbrella more money to pull off than they could ever hope to make off selling the virus, but any one of these innovations would make Umbrella rich if they didn't waste them on furthering their T-Virus initiative. And again, it's worth reminding they're still running these experiments and demonstrations for no clear reason, as if they (or the filmmakers) had forgotten all civilization has collapsed a few movies earlier.
    • And then it turns out in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter that, not unlike the original game series, they produced the T-Virus and funded all of the crazy stuff that had appeared throughout the series (genocidal Artificial Intelligences, a virus with the capacity to destroy the world, cloning technology, cryogenics) in an attempt to take out mankind and have it be reborn for the corporation's executives to lord over as "gods." Considering how much crazy tech they had going around, they could have probably managed to rule as gods over a populated Earth instead of a Death World. Their plan also involves freezing themselves in a place that could very easily be turned into zombie chow. It says a lot that Umbrella's CEO (who was the woman that Alice was cloned from) was not OK with the plan at all, so they froze her unwillingly so they would have free reign to execute it, and she accepted Alice's Roaring Rampage of Revenge as justice even if it meant getting killed herself.
  • Resident Evil: Damnation finally shows BOWs being used in the context of mildly conventional war. Lickers and other creatures are depicted as being very, very effective weapons in the right context. Damnation, though, is made by Capcom and is canon with the games; their characterization of the villains is somewhat less recklessly stupid compared to their film counterparts (to wit, Umbrella Inc. had already collapsed under the weight of its many blunders by the time someone got around to using their B.O.W.s in a military context).
• Star Wars:
  • The Dark Side — and the Sith philosophy in particular — are prone to this. The Sith encourage selfishness and not controlling your emotions, which meant that pretty much all Sith were too impulsive to get anything really done. Any time they actually tried to get a complete order together, they were done in by the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that pretty much all Sith had, necessitating the Rule of Two just to keep the order alive. Making things worse, any Sith steeped enough in the Dark Side to become truly powerful tends to become blind to the Light Side, which tripped Darth Sidious up when he couldn't sense Luke at a critical moment and didn't notice that his apprentice Darth Vader still had some good in him.
  • Subverted by Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus, who managed to keep his Dark Side corruption in check and actually had a sensible vision of what The Empire would be. In the Revenge of the Sith novelization, it's revealed that Dooku's plan was that he and Sidious would turn Anakin together and do away with the Rule of Two, Dooku would publicly denounce the Separatists while Anakin would use his legacy and influence to rally as many Jedi as possible to Palpatine's side, and the three of them would turn the Jedi Order into a Sith order known as the Fist of the Empire. Palpatine would be the Emperor while Dooku, with his age and wisdom, would lead the new "Jedi", with Anakin as their face, fist, and military leader. Sidious, however, was blinded by greed and sadism and refused to share power, leading to the typical results for Sith and an exponentially weaker Empire. Ironically, in Star Wars Legends Anakin's descendants the Fels managed to create a Hegemonic Empire almost exactly like the one Dooku envisioned which lasted peacefully for over a century until the Sith happened. Again.
  • There is also Grand Moff Tarkin. When he destroyed the populated planet Alderaan as a show of force, he guaranteed that many of the population of the Empire would realize the pure evil of its government and the Rebel Alliance would have a surge in support, especially when it proves a credible military force by destroying the Death Star a few days later. In general, Tarkin's beliefs were steeped in the idea that as long as you were negotiating from a position of power (which the Empire was), you could do pretty much whatever you wanted and nobody would even try to stop you… an idea that could only exist if the Death Star were truly indestructible. Which it wasn't. This is also ignoring his other idiotic decisions, like using the Death Star to blow up an Imperial military research facility, killing hundreds of the Empire's own troops and destroying valuable intelligence, mostly to kill the chief engineer of the Death Star project so he could take the credit and get a promotion, and being the one to replace the Clone Troopers with the Stormtroopers because he thought it would be cheaper.
  • Darth Vader enters this territory in The Empire Strikes Back by constantly breaking his part of the deal with Lando Calrissian (who sold out Han and the Rebels to the Empire in order to protect his city from said Empire) by using Appeal to Force. Lando was already cooperating, but Vader's constant needless backstabbing eventually made Lando join the Rebels, directly leading to the downfall of the Empire in the next movie.
  • At first glance, the First Order of the Sequel Trilogy seemed to have learned lessons from the military shortcomings of the old Galactic Empire, but those turned out to be surface-level lessons that didn't address the true downfall of the Empire. Their higher ranks are filled with selfish and power-hungry sociopaths who are more than happy to sabotage the First Order's efforts just to make their rivals lose or cover-up their own incompetence. Their plan to take over the galaxy is to destroy the New Republic government and then launch a full-scale conquering spree without the existing infrastructure that the New Republic provided. And of course, their investment in planet-destroying superweapons ultimately backfires, as it sparks a mass rebellion across the galaxy rather keeping them in fear as Tarkin once hoped with the original Death Star (especially when said-superweapons end up getting destroyed by the Resistance on Exegol).
• In Superman II, Lex Luthor betrays Superman for the continent of Australia, then is betrayed himself when he tries to collect, twice. Despite this proof that he will not be rewarded for his behavior, when faced with the chance to save himself (and everyone else) by luring General Zod and his lackeys into a trap, he again betrays Superman instead because he just can't stand to not betray Superman. Luckily, Superman actually took this into account, and rigged the device to depower everyone outside the chamber.
• Those Who Wish Me Dead:
  • The Blackwells would probably have more success trying to kill their targets if their main strategy wasn't to cause an insane amount of collateral damage and kill anyone who even looks at them. For just one example of their stupidity, after successfully killing their target Owen Casserly in a car crash on an isolated road in the middle of the Montana wilderness, and realizing his ten-year old son Connor has escaped into the woods, they decide that rather than chase after the likely injured kid, they decide they should prioritize avoiding the police over looking for the kid despite being in the middle of the wilderness. Their idea to do this is to set the forest on fire and kidnap the sheriff's pregnant wife.
  • The cabal of evil corporates who hired the Blackwell brothers are a more notable example. Their freedom depends on a lot of people being murdered very fast, simultaneously, so none will catch up on what is going on and try to escape. This is a situation that requires the hiring of multiple hitmen. They only hire the Blackwells to save money, which leads to some of said targets catching up and trying to run away, which leads to all of the rest of the chaos of the story as the Blackwells try to adapt to being dealt a bad hand. The Blackwells even chew out their contact at the midway point of the film about the sheer stupidity of their decision to cut the proverbial corners.
• Titanic (1997): Cal willingly passes up an opportunity to escape on a lifeboat after bribing First Officer Murdoch for another chance to separate Rose and Jack and indirectly arrange the latter's death. When that doesn't work, he then wastes even more time trying to murder both of them by chasing them down the grand staircase with a pistol. When he finally tries to get on the lifeboats again, the situation has deteriorated to the point where Murdoch tells him to eff off and throws his money back in his face. It's mostly by chance that Cal survives the sinking at all.
• Trading Places: The Dukes seem brilliant, but althroughout the movie, there are also signs they are actually not the financial geniuses they've been made out to be, but spoiled jerks who've always had things handed to them:
  • They are willing to risk their entire fortune on a single scam that could backfire horrendously, and when the process begins, they don't stay on the floor in case something could go wrong, despite knowing their broker has some psychological issues. Mortimer does seem to recognize this on some level, but not enough to not go through with it.
    Mortimer Duke: I told you we shouldn't have committed everything, you asshole!
  • Their willingness to destroy the life of one of their most loyal employees, Louis Winthope, and the fiancé of their grandniece, Penelope Witherspoon, speaks to a staggering degree of immaturity that only someone without any understanding of responsibility would ever do. Louis may be a snob, but he's an incredibly capable businessman, charming, and seems devoted to Penelope. He's the kind of man who would want as an in-law and to one day run your business. And they cut this man's throat over a stupid bet?
  • The revelation that the bet that the whole plot revolves around is over a single, measly dollar. Louis and Billy Ray are both stupefied at the fact the Dukes manipulated them over so little, and Louis was actually willing to go and blow them away with a shotgun before Billy Ray convinced him that scamming the Dukes would be sweeter. In a plot that showcases again and again how unfathomable their vileness is, this is just the cherry on the top.
  • It is implied they've played similar games with others before. This is bad, but it essentially means they have the mentality of prep school pranksters, only they never actually grew up or learned to take responsibility for their actions.
  • The head of the exchange seems very happy to kick them off of their seats. It is possible the man doesn't like how the Dukes have gamed the system and he believes they aren't deserving of their place in the business world.
  • Louis, while a snob, at least treats his own butler Coleman decently enough. The Dukes, meanwhile, give really lousy tips to their butler, so much so that he cusses them out under his breath. A smart rich person would know to treat the hired help generously, if not out of morals, then out of pragmatism. And surely enough, Coleman hates actually doing the Dukes' bidding and cares enough about Louis to help him out when he sees the Dukes' have crossed the line.
  • The Dukes are willing to throw the street smart Billy Ray Valentine back into the street for no other reason than the color of his skin. While racism is a good enough explanation, there is also another more sinister reason: envy. Valentine, despite being a poor guy without much education, was able to learn the commodities game very quickly. Both Mortimer and Randolph have had their pride wounded seeing a poor black guy being better at them trading commodities. A more rational businessman, even one with prejudice, would want to have someone like Billy Ray, a street smart man without airs, on their staff. But being the immature brats they are, they're willing to destroy a valuable employee to make themselves feel good.
  • It is possible the reason Mortimer is so damn furious when he goes broke is because he knows that without his money, he has no real talent or skills to fall back on. All his life, he has coasted on money, and without that, he has nothing.
  • They never bothered to cover up the documents that proved they were paying off Clarence Beeks to both get them the crop report and destroy Louis's life. Both Louis and Billy Ray were able to find them and thus ruin their whole scheme.
  • So who knows? Maybe even without Louis and Billy Ray destroying them, it is likely those two would've destroyed themselves through their own selfish and immature behavior.
• The villains of Train are organ and body-part thieves, which you'd think would deter them from damaging the "merchandise" via gratuitously sadistic and pointless brutalization and mutilation.
• Waterworld: The smokers own all the world's guns, ammunition, and fuel, so they could easily rule the world and force traders and atolls to pay them tribute. Instead, they kill everyone they see, take everything that's useful, and burn everything else. If the hero didn't kill them, they would eventually die because of a lack of people to steal from.
• The Wishmaster films, in a big way. The Jerkass Genie actually has motivation for his job: once the person who releases him makes three wishes, genies will be freed from the hell-dimension they're trapped in and rampage across the Earth. He time and again proves not just to be Obviously Evil, but also a unique combination of Stupid Evil and Chaotic Stupid. He could simply trust that the person who released him would have three things that they wanted to wish for (and odds of that are pretty high), but instead, he insists on causing mayhem and destruction whenever someone makes a wish (particularly random people who aren't the person who can free the genies with three wishes), ensuring that whoever actually did free him will never make their three wishes. Of course, he does have some justification. When the titular genie grants a wish to anyone other than the one who frees him, he gets to own that person's soul, which boosts his magical power exponentially. After gaining enough souls, he probably can either personally break his fellow genies out of their hell-dimension, or compel the one who freed him to ask for three wishes, a tactic he has tried several times with varying levels of success.
• The James Bond films usually feature diabolical masterminds some of whom fit this trope. As sophisticated as their plans might be, some of them do pretty stupid things (quite probably as a narrative device to have some action during the otherwise longsome investigation).
  • Dr. No has a British agent and his secretary killed. The agent's killing might have been ruled as random since it happened on the street. But shooting the secretary in the agent's base of operation (and nicking the files on Dr. No) not only started the MI6 investigation but also pointed to the one who was responsible (and that something shady was going on).
  • In Thunderball Count Lippe tried to kill James Bond for no other reason than the latter noticing some tattoo on Lippe's arm. At least in the book it is for that childish clash that Blofeld had his mook killed.
  • In You Only Live Twice, there were two quite questionable reactions bordering on stupid. When James Bond left Osato's office a car full of mooks made an attempt on his life. And when James Bond flew over the dormant vulcano in his Little Nellie some helicopters seemingly appeared out of nowhere and started a racket. Of course, in both incidences the good guys got the chance to show off with their ressourceful gadgets. In the end, the baddies were just yelling: "Yes, Mr. Bond, you are on the right track."
  • In Live and Let Die Dr. Kananga laid out some bread crumbs when he killed three agents, one in New York, one in New Orleans and one in San Monique leading James Bond - what a coincidence - from New York to New Orleans directly to the villain's lair in San Monique.
  • In Moonraker, James Bond investigates the hijacking of the eponymic Space Shuttle. At the Drax Industries complex he meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and his henchman Chang. Even before Bond was able to gather evidence, Drax ordered Chang to assassinate Bond and Make It Look Like an Accident. Naturally Bond survives by subverting that gadgets only work once.
  • Why kill a private detective in A View to a Kill? And in public? Sure, Grace Jones is a treat. And it lead to some chasing scenes that left half of Paris in shambles. But now we all and the butterfly lady know that there was more to it than just doping some horses to win prestigious races.
  • Druglord Franz Sanchez (Licence to Kill) not only bothered entering the USA where he was on the most wanted list only to get his girlfriend back and to literally rip her stud's heart out. After his escape from the arrest instead of leaving the country in a jiffy, he also made a detour to maim CIA's Felix Leiter (the supervisor of Sanchez' arrest) and kill his newly-wed wife. Anybody who thinks that his idiocy didn't call for Bond's Roaring Rampage of Revenge?
  • Given that the Austin Powers films are essentially a parody of James Bond, it should come as no surprise that Dr. Evil would deliberately tick off every "Stupid Evil" box one-by-one. Examples include undermining the efforts of The Dragon to earn money via legitimate means and shushing his far more pragmatic son every time he asks "Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?"

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