Talia al Ghul from Dark Knight Rises

Beautiful, cunning, deceiving, and smart– just a handful of words to describe Talia al Ghul, our female villain from Dark Knight Rises. Played by Marion Cotillard, Talia al Ghul is ally and friend to Bane played by Thomas Hardy. Their alliance strategically plans to take down Batman in a very slow and calculated way. Our favorite villains tend to be those who sneak into our heroes lives and plan to destroy them from the inside out. Talia is the perfect, if not best, example of what patience it takes to make the ultimate takedown plan. After the death of her father, Ra’s al Ghul, Talia takes up his plans to destroy Gotham and does so by pretending to be a rich businesswoman by the name of Miranda Tate, going as far as joining the board of Wayne Enterprises.

Though she doesn’t have any special powers, her skills of manipulation and trickery make her worthy of our list of best female comic book movie villains. In fact, she proves to be quite the match for Bruce Wayne/Batman because of their similar approaches to their end goals. They both uses their family inheritance to further their plans, disguising themselves as wealthy members of Gotham society while hiding who they truly are and what they are truly after. Her great patience, perhaps from a childhood spent in prison, is sometimes highlighted as a weakness as well, as it is ultimately what leads to her downfall. She waits too long to detonate her nuclear bomb.

Talia highlights what she does best when she tells Bruce, “You see, it’s the slow knife…the knife that takes its time. The knife…that waits years without forgetting…then slips quietly between the bones. That’s the knife…that cuts deepest.”