Random Movie Heroes Who Killed Lots Of Innocent People Without You Noticing (15 items)

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  (#9) President Thomas J. Whitmore

  • Independence Day

  Before the heroes of Independence Day are finally able to infiltrate the alien invaders' mother ship to upload their bafflingly successful virus, the human race exhausted all other options to defeat their enemies. See, prior to their eventual victory, and despite the fact that dreamy scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) warned against it, the otherwise heroic President Thomas J. Whitmore decided that the world’s only possible chance of victory was to nuke the aliens out of the sky. 

  It seems reasonable, if desperate, until you consider the fact that they launch the missiles directly over Houston, a sprawling metropolis that home to nearly 2 million people when the film premiered in 1996. Even if the explosive blast didn’t reach the citizens below, the radiation would impact generations of people to come. 
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  (#10) Cameron Poe

  • Con Air

  The smooth talking, long-haired hero of Con Air is one of the most cherished characters from the ‘90s. He's a man wrongfully imprisoned man who just wants to get home to see his beautiful wife and daughter. How can you not root for him? But when he makes the mind-boggling decision to land an actual plane in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, you're left to wonder why he didn’t face a new, legitimate prison sentence.

  While defenders of Poe might remind you that he was not, in fac,t flying the plane, he was in the cock pit. He could have found some part of the vast desert that surrounds Vegas to land, instead of crashing into the busiest part of the only city for miles. Carnage ensues when he lands, as the plane crashes into multiple cars, signs, and casinos. There's simply no way that plane didn't cause the death of countless civilians, all because Poe couldn't be bothered to aim for a cactus.
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  (#12) Bruce Nolan

  • Bruce Almighty

  When you're given the powers of God, you're bound to make a few mistakes. In Bruce Almighty, the titular comedic deity does just that when he uses his newfound powers to lasso the Moon closer to Earth to impress the woman he loves. It seems like a sweet, romantic gesture, until you consider the role the Moon plays on the tides. A closer moon would mean an increase in gravitational pull, creating massive tidal anomalies which would likely end in thousands, if not millions of casualties.
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  (#11) James T. Kirk

  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

  Captain James Tiberius Kirk stands for peace, justice, and general badassery. Sure, he's a bit of a hot head, but you always know that Kirk's heart is in the right place. In Star Trek Into Darkness, he saved the life of the man who killed his father figure, in service of the sanctity of sentient life. Well, sentient life that looks like Kirk, anyway.

  In 2009's Star Trek, Captain Kirk killed the entire crew of the Narada, a Romulan mining vessel from a future timeline. He gave the order to fire on the Narada, a ship full of time-displaced miners grieving the loss of their families and their culture, and sent them into a black hole to be consumed. Remember, Narada was a massive ship. It's statistically impossible that all of the crew were insane zealots. Likely, many of them were just trying to get home, or at least visit their family in the past. Kirk robbed them of that opportunity when he consigned them to oblivion, and he was rewarded with a promotion and command of his own ship.       
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  (#6) Dominic Toretto

  • Fast Five, Los Bandoleros, Fast & Furious, The Fast and the Furious, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, The Fast and the Furious 6

  Who knew that the heroes of the Fast and Furious franchise were also responsible for scores of deaths on the streets of Rio de Janeiro? In Fast Five, Dom and Brian successfully complete a heist where they literally pull a massive bank vault through the streets of the Brazilian city, smashing through police cars, buildings, and bus stops. While Mia Toretto excuses some of the damage by saying, “Well the plan is working, you guys have every corrupt cop in Rio on your tail,” it’s safe to assume that as the damage and mayhem continued to mount, so to would the need for cops, both corrupt and otherwise.

  Innocent civilians also faced injury or death when the vault smashed through the glass walls of a bank. While the movie would have you believe that everyone got away, how likely is it that a large group of people waiting in line at a bank were each able to dodge a several-ton metal vault careening towards them at 60 miles per hour? Exactly.

  The traffic accidents Dom and Brian caused would have likely killed scores of people, and in the end, Dom turns the safe into a deadly wrecking ball, which he smashes into nine police cars before finally reaching the two SUVs driven by the actual bad guys. Who’s to say that all of those police officers were the corrupt cops Mia mentioned? Even if they stayed on the straight and narrow for their entire careers, they could have easily still found themselves on that bridge, and on the very wrong end of Dom and Brian’s murderous bank heist. Luckily, thanks to Dr. Randall Kelley, a physicist at Harvard, we now know that the physics behind their stunt would make the mayhem mathematically impossible.
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  (#14) Tyler Durden

  • Fight Club

  While he’s not exactly a hero, Tyler Durden's (Brad Pitt) also not exactly a villain. It's beyond argument, though, that he is one of the most beloved characters in film history. Despite his anarchic outlooks on the world, Durden does possess a staunch moral code. This outlook culminates in Durden’s execution of "Project Mayhem," an attempt at freeing the millions of Americans in credit card debt – and thus releasing them from the shackles of capitalism.

  When the Narrator (Edward Norton) and Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) watch as Project Mayhem becomes reality by way of blowing up several massive buildings, we feel okay about it. After all, Tyler just reminded us that all of the employees in the buildings worked for him, so there's no way anybody died.

  Well, except for any of the people who might have happened to be walking by. Or driving by. Or driving a block away. Or any of the first responders. Think of the thousands of first responders who struggle with terminal illness in the wake of 9/11. The terrorist attack Tyler carried out looks to be devastating in its own right, so we can be reasonably sure that he murdered a good chunk of the city's population while trying to free them from financial slavery. 

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