Sheriff Roscoe P Coltrane
The Movie: The Dukes Of Hazzard (2005)
The Boss: Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds), the flamboyantly OTT, white-suited landowner who plans to snatch the Dukes family farm and turn it into a coal mine.
Given how annoying our heroes are, this doesn’t really sound like such a bad idea. It might teach them a lesson.
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time: In fairness to Coltrane, he’s written to be a blundering boob because, once again, if he were one wit smarter, he’d easily outfox the giggling, car-obsessed idiots that are our putative leads.
Still, it’s saying something when you find the most idiotic redneck in a town crawling with them, slap on a police badge and then expect him to be effective.
Cute dog, though.
Kent
The Movie: Real Genius (1985)
The Boss: Professor Jerry Hathaway (the inestimable William Atherton), a snide, preening academic jackass who is secretly plotting to harness his students’ braniac talents to build weapons for the military.
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time : Kent’s the sort of privileged, snivelling brain-jock who takes a cruel delight in torturing poor Mitch Taylor (Gabe Jarret), snitching on his party-loving students and sucking up to Hathaway.
He’s a useless fool, though – and our favourite example of his ineptitude is getting gassed and knocked out by his enemies, then waking up to find he’s talking to “Jesus” – through the magic of his braces.
Tokka and Rahzar
The Movie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooz e (1991)
The Boss: Shredder (François Chau), the blade-shouldered ninja master who is constantly frustrated in his life of crime by four wise-cracking mutant turtles and his seeming inability to locate decent help.
In the second film, he turned to science to try for something more useful. Science let him down badly…
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time: Using the same weird chemical that turned the turtles into humanoid warriors, Shredder forges Tokka the turtle… thing and Rahzar, a sort of drooling dog-like beast.
They seem to be working out well – the pair even defeat the Turtles at one point. But they turn out to be bone-headed, over-impetuous dolts.
Klytus
The Movie: F lash Gordon (1980)
The Boss: Ming The Merciless (Max Von Sydow), the ultimate space-opera baddie and prime moustache twirler. He doesn’t want much in life, except to RULE THE ENTIRE GALAXY! Muahahahaaaaaa… Sorry. Carried away.
But despite being seemingly all-powerful, he really doesn’t have the best taste in associates.
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time: Despite his cultured accent and seemingly efficient ruthlessness (or ruthless efficiency, take your pick), he’s still A Bit Useless.
Sure, he’s got the fancy, Doctor Doom-wannabe gold mask and he keeps assuring Ming that he’ll get the job of torturing/hunting/killing Flash Gordon done, but even when he swans off on his mission, he’s quickly killed by the square-jawed Yank and Timothy Dalton’s poncy Prince Barin.
Sad.
Boris Grishenko
The Movie: GoldenEye (1995)
The Boss: Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), a former 00 agent who fakes his death to get revenge on the UK for its involvement in his parents’ death.
His big plan is to nick the control system for the Russian military’s new electromagnetic weapon satellites, and use it in a typically Bond-ian plan to ruin the economy (if only he’d waited a few years!)
To this end, he needs some technical help…
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time: Dear lord, if Boris isn’t one of the more annoying Bond henchmen in the history of the series. And that's saying something.
Sure, he’s a genius computer hacker, but he’s also an OCD nut job who delights in declaring himself “invincible”, which is proved utterly wrong when he’s frozen by liquid nitrogen and blown to tiny little bits by a huge explosion.
Ayel
Spoiler Alert!
The Movie: Star Trek (2009)
The Boss: Nero (Eric Bana), a Romulan driven mad by the destruction of his home planet by a supernova and the death of his family.
He’s accidentally sent back in time in the Narada, their giant, powerful, modified ship and, instead of just going to warn Romulus of its future fate, decides to punish Spock (who he blames for his home world’s demise) by getting a little planetary revenge.
His main assistant is loyal crewmember Ayel.
You Have Failed Me For The Last Time: Ayel means well, but never quite makes the grade. Sure, he’s fine when throwing fancy holograms around or extracting globs of Red Matter to help destroy planets.
But when crunch time comes, he bottles it: getting up close and personal with the young Jim Kirk, he decides to give a little speech about how weak humans are. Which is the villain’s job.
And it also buys time for Kirk to nick his gun and, er, shoot him with it. Doofus!
