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

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  (#1) Professor X

  • Magneto, X-Men: First Class, Superhero!, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men, X2, X-Men Origins: Wolverine

  A father figure for many of the world’s mutant superheroes, Professor Xavier is a fan favorite and one of the best X-Men characters of all time. He's so beloved, in fact, so much we missed it when he was responsible for the death of thousands of humans and mutants.

  In X2, Professor X uses his telepathic amplifier Cerebro to connect with every human on the planet and give them all excruciating, incapacitating headaches. Sure, he’s under control of another mutant, and is forced to target humans by his arch nemesis Magneto, but none of it would have even been possible without Professor X’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and control, which led him to build Cerebro in the first place.

  So how many people did he kill? If we assume that the incapacitating headache lasted anywhere between 5-10 minutes as shown in the film, given that approximately 660,000 people are being flown in airplanes around the world at any given time, we reasonably infer that many of those individuals were killed by the wheelchair-bound pacifist. 
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  (#2) Elsa

  • Frozen

  It's clear throughout Frozen that Elsa is a little unhinged, and she has every right to be. Her parents locked her up for the entirety of her formative years, and she grew up afraid to touch anything. However, a messed up childhood doesn't excuse straight-up mass murder. 

  As Elsa sings one of the catchiest and most over-played songs of the past decade, she creates an ice palace for herself and inadvertently covers her home kingdom of Arendelle in eternal winter. To clarify: it wasn't almost winter already. This cataclysmic weather shift came out of nowhere. How many infants must have died, their frail bodies unaccustomed to the cold? How many families starved to death, their crops destroyed by frost? Elsa may have found herself and received her sister's forgiveness, but she will be remembered as an unforgiving and cruel godhead by her people for generations. 
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  (#3) Luke Skywalker

  • Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Return of the Ewok, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

  While the Sith and the Jedi might have you believe that morals in the Galaxy are as black and white as the Force, we know that can’t be the case. Thanks to The Force Awakens and Rogue One, we learn that many of those who worked for the Empire did so against their will. Many Imperial workers and soldiers had no other option to keep themselves and their families safe.

  Knowing that, we have to assume that many of the employees on both the original Death Star, and the Death Star II were just as oppressed as those fighting for the rebellion. With that information, the complete and indiscriminate destruction of both battle stations, and the people on board, takes on a much more sinister sheen. It also paints the celebration and joy that follows in a new, harrowing light. 
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  (#4) Neo

  • Sex and the Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, The Matrix, Kid's Story, The Matrix Revisited, MTV Movie Awards Reloaded

  In The Matrix Neo's goal is to free mankind from slavery at the hands of sentient machines. However, by the sequel The Matrix Reloaded, it becomes clear that Neo is much more concerned with his love life than the future of the human race. We see how love trumps life for Neo when he races to save Trinity, after she is ambushed and shot by Agent Smith. Neo flies to reach her in time and miraculously save her life.

  The problem is, the speed at which he flies creates a sonic boom of destruction. Buildings rupture and countless cars get pulled into his supersonic wake. While you might give him a pass because he is in the Matrix, we must remember that all those people in the cars and buildings are connected to real, powerless, humans still enslaved by the intelligent machines and at the mercy of Neo’s power. As the movie tells the audience over and over, if you die in the Matrix, you die for real. By the film's own logic, that makes Neo a very real mass murderer. 
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  (#5) Genie

  • Aladdin, Aladdin and the King of Thieves, Arabian Nights, The Return of Jafar

  In the film Aladdin, the Genie is a figure of terrifying potency. As he says himself, he possess near-unlimited cosmic power. He expresses his magic through wishes, but he's bound by three rules: 1) he can't kill anybody, 2) he can't make anybody fall in love with anybody else, and 3) he can't bring people back from the dead.

  While these may seem like hard-and-fast rules, it's pretty clear they're just the Genie's preference, not a statement of limitations. After the "no bringing back people from the dead" clause, the Genie adds "...it's not a pretty picture. I don't like doing it!" He doesn't like doing it. Not he can't, or won't, he just doesn't like it. The same probably holds true for his other "rules."

  So when, exactly, does the Genie kill countless innocents? Why, after a big song-and-dance number, of course. See, after Aladdin wished to be a prince, the genie made him a prince. Literally. He didn't wish to appear to be a prince or seem to be a prince, so the Genie made him an actual prince. And that means subjects. All the people we see in the song "Prince Ali" are real, thinking humans. They have to be, otherwise Aladdin is prince of nothing.

  So what happens to those people? Since we don't see them in any of the direct-to-video sequels, or the spin-off television series – and they're never mentioned again – we have to assume the Genie "unmade" them once Aladdin got the girl, and assumed the regal role he really wanted. That's murder, the same way it's murder if a parent kills a child.  
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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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  (#7) Raleigh Antrobus

  • Pacific Rim

  It’s hard not to incur casualties when Earth is under attack from massive aliens rising out of the ocean floor, but Raleigh and his Jaeger, “Gypsy Danger,” don’t do anything to help mitigate loss of life during their battle with several Kaiju in the streets of Hong Kong.

  While the city was already under attack before Gypsy Danger shows up, Raleigh (along with his fellow Jaeger pilot Mako) made matters much worse when they inadvertently took the battle from the water off the coast of Hong Kong to a naval port, and eventually to what seems to be center of the ciy. From using an oil tanker as a baseball bat, to smashing through highway bridges and giant sky scrapers, Raleigh, Mako, and Gypsy Danger ended the lives of a lot more than just a few Kaiju.
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  (#8) Danny Ocean

  • Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Thirteen, Ocean's Twelve

  This movie, and its group of heroes, could have easily made millions without causing mass off-screen deaths. In Ocean's Eleven, Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle) comes up with a genius way to fry the security system of their targeted casino, using an EMP device that he refers to as "a pinch" to shut off all the power in Las Vegas. 

  Tarr describes the EMP as a "device which creates, like, a cardiac arrest for any broadband electrical circuitry." While the plan goes off without a hitch, not one of the 11 criminal masterminds considers that an EMP detonation could cause literal cardiac arrest for anyone in the Las Vegas dependent on a pacemaker. Additionally, a total blackout in a city as large as Las Vegas could cause a potentially huge number of injuries and fatalities from road accidents, people dependent on life support in hospitals, and much more.

  To make matters worse, the subsequent mayhem we see take place on the Bellagio casino likely happened on every casino floor in the city. Las Vegas probably erupted into a small war zone, and physical altercations surely would have accounted for a non-zero amount of casualties.
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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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#13) Bryan Mills

  • Taken, Taken 2

  This hero’s very particular set of skills appears to include the ability to cause mayhem and death for innocent people without batting an eye. We all know that Mills is a straight-up murderer, but we get to feel okay about it since he only kills bad guys. 

  In the third installment of the Taken series, however, Mills uses a busy highway to free himself from custody. While it makes for an exciting scene and facilitates his escape, the numerous high-speed crashes – and the cargo crate that rolls over several cars, crushing them entirely – definitely ended more than a few innocent lives.
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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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  (#15) Superman

  • Man of Steel, Superman, Superman II, Superman, Superman III, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Justice League: New Frontier, Superman: Doomsday, Justice League: Doom, Hindsight Is 20/20, Hot Shots!, Superman Returns, Superman

  The large-scale destruction during the climax of Man of Steel was considered by many to be too much of a mediocre thing, as Superman and General Zod fly and fight their way through Metropolis. While it’s been covered time and time again, the damage was so great that it simply could not be left off this list.

  While the battle between the two Kryptonians was certainly interesting to watch, viewers couldn’t escape the massive loss of life the film glossed over. Thanks to Buzzfeed and disaster expert Charles Watson, we have an estimate of the loss of life: a mind-blowing 129,000 confirmed dead with over 250,000 missing (many of whom are presumed dead) and nearly 1,000,000 more individuals injured. On top of that, Watson estimated the initial monetary damage at $700 billion, with total damage costing $2 trillion over the long term. Quite a hefty toll for the Kryptonian who claims to be the savior of the human race.

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