Every Bond villain owns a gun. Most own several hundred, plus a private army, a lair and a large man whose entire job is holding one. And yet, again and again, they get 007 alone and helpless and decide the moment calls for a laser, a shark or a three course dinner.
Across the 25 official Eon Bond films, villains keep making the same mistake, so we ranked the worst offenders. The rule: the villain had Bond captured, cornered or at gunpoint, and chose something sillier than a bullet. We’re ranking how avoidable the mistake was, not how good the scene is. We count from “we sort of see your point” down to “you had one job.”
18 to 14: We sort of see your point
18. Sanchez and Dario, Licence to Kill (1989)
Sanchez finally catches Bond in his drug lab, ties him hand and foot, and puts him on the conveyor belt that feeds cocaine bricks into a giant grinder. Then Sanchez leaves with his men and trusts Dario to finish the job. Dario gets as far as his knife before Pam Bouvier shoots him, and Bond pulls him into his own grinder.
17. Helga Brandt, You Only Live Twice (1967)
Helga has Bond tied up in her cabin, interrogates him, seduces him, then offers to fly him back to Tokyo. Mid flight she drops a flare, leaves him stuck in his seat and parachutes out. That is a lot of logistics to avoid squeezing a trigger. Bond lands the plane, and Blofeld, who does not reward creativity, feeds Helga to his piranhas.
16. Kristatos, For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Bond and Melina surface with the ATAC and find Kristatos waiting on their boat. He has the boat, the crew, the device and two tired divers. So he ties them together and drags them behind the boat over coral, through shark water. Bond cuts them loose and they hide on the bottom, breathing from a spare tank Melina happened to leave down there.
15. Kamal Khan, Octopussy (1983)
Kamal has Bond locked up in his palace, and Bond gets out. Kamal’s fix is to turn the problem into a sport: a full big game hunt through the jungle, on elephants, with Bond as the tiger. Bond escapes with a boatload of passing tourists. If you want a man dead, do not make it a hobby.
14. Kananga and Tee Hee, Live and Let Die (1973)
Kananga has Bond strapped down with Tee Hee’s pincer ready to start on his fingers, then decides the job is better done off site. Tee Hee and Adam drive Bond to a crocodile farm, strand him on a tiny island in the pond and walk away. Bond runs out across the crocodiles’ backs like stepping stones.
13 to 10: Now you’re just showing off
13. Elliot Carver, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Carver is a media mogul, so naturally he wants an audience. Bond and Wai Lin are captured, handcuffed together and flown to his Saigon tower. Carver then hands them over to Stamper and his collection of torture “toys” and leaves. Still handcuffed to each other, they abseil down the side of the building on a giant banner and escape on one motorcycle, each steering half of it.
12. Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Two professional killers, three chances. They seal Bond in a coffin and roll him into a crematorium, and the oven gets switched off when the gang learns the diamonds were fake. Later they leave him unconscious inside a desert pipeline. Finally they try a bomb hidden in a cake. Kidd ends up in flames and Wint goes overboard with his own bomb.
11. Elektra King, The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Elektra straps Bond into an antique garrote chair and tightens it a notch at a time while telling him how much he meant to her. Zukovsky staggers in, gets shot, and uses his cane gun to break one of Bond’s restraints with his last move. Minutes later Bond has Elektra at gunpoint. He does not make her sit in a chair first.
10. Emilio Largo, Thunderball (1965)
Largo keeps sharks in his swimming pool, and Bond ends up in it. Bond gets out. At the very end, on the Disco Volante, Largo finally has Bond at gunpoint, the moment every villain dreams about, and still doesn’t fire fast enough. Domino puts a spear in his back.
9 to 5: Somebody hand this man a pistol
9. Max Zorin, A View to a Kill (1985)
Zorin learns Bond is a spy, has him knocked out, and pushes him into a lake in his own Rolls Royce. Zorin and May Day watch it sink and gloat. Gloating is not checking. Bond breathes air from the tyres. Later, at San Francisco City Hall, Zorin shoots a city official right in front of Bond, so he clearly knows how a gun works, then traps Bond and Stacey in a lift and sets the building on fire instead.
8. Dr. No, Dr. No (1962)
The one who started it. Bond and Honey are captured on Crab Key, cleaned up, drugged, and woken in time for dinner. Dr. No walks Bond through the whole SPECTRE scheme to topple American rockets and offers him a job. Bond declines, rudely, and gets beaten and locked in a cell with a ventilation shaft. Dr. No ends up in his own reactor pool, and every villain below copied his homework.
7. Raoul Silva, Skyfall (2012)
Silva has Bond tied to a chair on his private island and uses the moment to flirt. Then he walks him outside, balances a glass of scotch on Severine’s head, and hands Bond a pistol. Bond misses, and Silva murders Severine. Moments later Bond takes out Silva’s men and the Royal Navy helicopters arrive. Silva will later insist getting caught was part of his plan. Handing his prisoner a loaded gun was not.
6. Alec Trevelyan, GoldenEye (1995)
Trevelyan was 006. He knows exactly what Bond can do. So he sedates him and leaves him in a stolen Tiger helicopter with Natalya, rigged to fire its own missiles at itself. Bond ejects them both. Later Bond fights his way onto Trevelyan’s armoured train, and Trevelyan locks him inside with a countdown. A former double O should know the countdown is where Bond does his best work.
5. Blofeld, Spectre (2015)
After a whole film of Spectre trying to kill Bond, Blofeld finally straps him into a chair in his desert crater and goes at his skull with precision drills. Madeleine throws Bond’s exploding watch at Blofeld, and Bond shoots his way out and blows up the base. Back in London, Blofeld leaves Bond in the ruins of the old MI6 building on a demolition timer. Bond gets out and shoots down Blofeld’s helicopter. Two clean chances, two contraptions.
4 to 1: You had one job
4. Scaramanga, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Scaramanga doesn’t just want Bond dead. He wants to win, which turns out to be an expensive distinction. The world’s most expensive assassin, a million dollars a kill and famous for needing only one golden bullet, gets Bond onto his private island, feeds him lunch and proposes a gentleman’s duel on the beach. He cheats, ducks into his funhouse, and loses anyway when Bond turns the funhouse’s own wax figures against him. One bullet. That was the brand.
3. Hugo Drax, Moonraker (1979)
Three attempts, and somehow Bond is still on the guest list. First his man Chang cranks Bond’s centrifuge ride up to a lethal speed. Then Drax takes Bond pheasant shooting with a sniper hidden in a tree, the one sensible idea he has, ruined by handing Bond a loaded shotgun first. Bond uses it on the sniper. Finally Drax has Bond and Holly locked under the launch platform so his shuttle’s exhaust will cook them. They escape and steal the next shuttle.
2. Grant, From Russia with Love (1963)
Grant is the best pure killer in the series. He has already murdered Kerim Bey on the Orient Express, he drugs Tatiana, and he holds Bond at gunpoint in their compartment. Then he talks, all the way through the plan and his escape route. Bond offers him fifty gold sovereigns and lures him into opening the other attache case, the one Grant took off the real Nash. Grant opens it the wrong way and Q Branch’s tear gas goes off in his face. Bond’s verdict on the giveaway was the red wine with fish. Ours is the briefcase.
1. Goldfinger, Goldfinger (1964)
The gold standard. Goldfinger straps Bond to a table under an industrial laser and delivers the most famous villain line ever spoken: “No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die!” Then Bond bluffs that MI6 already knows about Operation Grand Slam and will shut it down if he dies. Fair enough: Goldfinger decides Bond is worth more alive. The trouble is the next step. He flies Bond to the Kentucky stud farm where the whole plan lives, close enough to overhear every detail and smuggle out a warning. One bullet in Switzerland, and Grand Slam goes ahead on schedule.
The lesson
Eighteen entries, a small arsenal between them, and not one well placed shot. To every aspiring mastermind out there: skip the laser, skip the sharks, skip the dinner. Shoot first, monologue never.
Goldfinger takes first place. Wint and Kidd had three chances and still came twelfth.