6) Whiplash
The Iron Man series really has not had much success with their supervillains since the first film, and Whiplash was a great example of this.
Played valiantly by Mickey Rourke, Ivan Vanko/Whiplash had a very interesting backstory that set up him to be an anti-Stark of sorts. His father, Anton Vanko, had helped Tony’s dad Howard Stark create the endless energy battery known as the arc reactor. However, when he tried to sell it for a profit, Stark had him deported where he was imprisoned in a Gulag for many years while Stark became a billionaire entrepreneur. Wanting to enact revenge for his father’s treatment, Ivan decides to destroy Tony’s image by not only constructing his own reactor, but also building several rival armored suits courtesy of the manipulation of Stark rival Justin Hammer.
While intriguing, the producers evidently decided to focus a good chunk of the movie on setting up The Avengers rather than developing these characters. As a result, Whiplash was thrown to the back, becoming a tonally inconsistent enemy that could go from snapping a guard’s neck to stupidly playing with his bird.
Though we got some cool lines out of him like “if you can make God bleed, people will cease to believe in him,” he was overall very lackluster. It’s no wonder that Rourke had nothing but disgust after his experience here.
7) Red Skull
Though a lot of people liked Hugo Weaving’s portrayal of Captain America archenemy the Red Skull, there really wasn’t much to him when examined closely. Red Skull’s problem is that he is, for all intents and purposes, an Indiana Jones enemy elevated to a higher status without the proper character depth. He’s literally a Nazi wanting to gain power for the sake of his Führer. That’s it.
It also doesn’t help that he’s not given much screen time and quickly dissipates at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger courtesy of touching the Tesseract. While there are theories that he could still be alive, his lack of appearance in both the Captain America sequels as well as The Avengers movies indicates otherwise. Who knows, though? Maybe we’ll see him back on the big screen one day.