so i rewatched the princess bride last weekend and i got an issue with it i never had before: vizzini’s a dumbass. we’re told he’s really smart– he tells us he’s really smart– but he doesn’t make one single smart decision in the entire movie. he doesn’t even make one sensible decision.
-he left some kind of token of a guilder officer on the horse, then let it loose to ‘go home’. horses on the loose don’t always make it back home. frequently they get lost, stolen, or die, because horses are both valuable and ridiculous. they should have killed the horse and left it on the path with some kind of manifesto attached, like ‘consider this official notice from guilder that we’re stealing your princess, fuck you’.
-he made absolutely absurd staffing decisions for a job that involved kidnapping an innocent women and then killing her to start a war. inigo’s a great duelist but his entire life is spent on a goddamn honor quest to avenge his unjustly murdered dad, and fezzik is huge and obedient but his background is being a show wrestler: neither of them are actually down with premediated murder. why the hell didn’t vizzini know this beforehand?
-when the man in black was climbing up the cliff face, they could have taken the rope, tied a large rock to the end, then just lowed the rope to be about level with the climbing man and bonked him with it until he fell off.
-leaving inigo and fezzik behind one by one was also overconfident and completely stupid considering, again, vizzini picked the wrong guys for the goddamn job. they should at least have ambushed the dude together while vizzini laid a false trail to somewhere dangerous (like the nearby fire swamp?) and then hid with buttercup somewhere else. a guy might be able to beat an honorable duelist or a giant wrestler, but if he can beat both at once, a ten or fifteen minute head start in a straight line towards guilder isn’t going to help anything.
-when the man in black catches up with vizzini, he’s holding buttercup at knifepoint. so like, what the fuck was his plan then? was he really going to walk backwards all the way to guilder with his knife on an angry, uncooperative girl’s throat and a man who can beat a duelist and a wrestler following along as closely as possible?
-the minute vizzini realized the man in black had defeated both his guys and was still intent on recovering the princess and was furthermore gaining on him, he should have stabbed the girl somewhere slowly and inconveniently fatal, like the thigh or stomach, then run like hell. the man in black would thus be diverted from going after vizzini, even if he’d wanted revenge, by having to stop and see if he could save the princess. which he could not have: stomach stabs can take a while to die from, but you do pretty much always die from them. so with buttercup dead in mysterious circumstances, even with the man in black somehow involved, guilder could still be blamed.
-anyway, prince humperdink, next time you wanna start a war with guilder, please DM me, im not going to fuck it up like this jackass
-hey come to think of it why the fuck didn’t humperdink just hire a guy to dress up in a guilder outfit and assasinate the king? he’d get his war and inherit early. humperdink DM me i wanna talk
