This is a good idea for a list. A movie with a Hero is only as good as its villain. There have been plenty of potentially great movies derailed by sub-par villains, and plenty of potentially mediocre movies elevated by great, memorable villains. Extra points if we can actually sympathize with the villain, at least a little bit. Off the top of my head, here are some of the best villains I can remember, and I am sure I am leaving many deserving ones out. In no particular order.. Agent Smith - The Matrix - Relentless and unstoppable, he Just.. wanted.. OUT.. of that stinking place! The Kurgan - Highlander - GREAT villain! Not afraid to have a little bit of fun with being an immortal walking slaughterhouse! 'Top Dollar' - The Crow - One of my favorite villain performances ever. They never really gave his name in the movie, but Michael Wincott's gravelly-voiced and long raven haired crime boss was as perfect a villain performance as you will ever see. Deacon Frost - Blade - Another exceptional villain elevating a movie into greatness. Little Bill - Unforgiven... and.. Herod - The Quick and the Dead - A Gene Hackman double-bill. Very different characters, and very different motivations, but both great Hackman villains in excellent westerns. Colonel Jessup - A Few Good Men .. and.. The Joker - Batman - Like Hackman, Nicholson seems to really enjoy his opportunities to play a villain. You could not find two more different performances, but in both cases, Nicholson absolutely stole the movies. Khan - The Wrath of Khan - While I quite enjoyed Cumberbatch in Into Darkness, I don't think that role will go down as one of the all-timers as a villain the way Montalban has in WoK. Now I love me some WoK, but the movie has not aged all that well, and watching Montalban's performance now, well, he just comes across mostly as a one-note over-confident megalomaniac.. which is fine, and he still goes on any Best Villains list, forever and ever.. but the script was pretty threadbare for his role, so he just ran with what he had. Great villain. Captain Barbosa - Pirates of the Caribbean - I may never see another actor having more fun than Geoffrey Rush had playing Barbosa. Utterly vile, but still playful and even sympathetic. No better villain performance! The Predator - Predator - No lines, but what a terrifying bad guy.. The Alien - Alien - Same deal. Perfect villian, distilled down to the essence of pure evil itself. Lord Blackwood - Sherlock Holmes - Guy Ritchie understood that in order for Sherlock Holmes to work well, he would need a true challenge in the form of a genuinely devious and malevolent villain. Mark Strong delivered with a top-shelf villain performance. And... Professor Moriarty - A Game of Shadows - Jared Harris absolutely killed it with his performance of one of the all-time legendary arch-nemesis roles, the infamous Professor Moriarty. Darth Vader - Empire Strikes Back - Vader became a great villain in ESB - in Star Wars, he was more of a lurking, potential bad guy than the actual real driving force of villainy.. but in ESB, he came front and center, and had several great scenes - my favorite was the reveal when the dining-room door opens, there stands Vader, Solo instantly draws and fires, Vader easily deflects the shots, and calmly asks them to join him. This was THE Star Wars movie. Alex - Fatal Attraction - Glenn Close caused a couple of entire generations of men to zip it back up. Belloq - Raiders of the Lost Ark - Belloq was a suave, intelligent cockroach of a villain, and I SO wanted to see him get his face punched in. Never has a villain's death been so satisfying at the end of a movie! Dr. Octavious - Spider Man 2 - Alfred Molina gave a great villain performance in the second Spider Man movie - again, sympathetic and driven progressively over the edge by ambition, grief and even revenge. I did NOT like Willem Dafoe's portrayal of Green Goblin by the way. Lord Tod - Mon & Dad Save the World - LOL ok, well, I love the movie, and Jon Lovitz delivered one of the most inept and hilariously funny movie villains of all time. And no, I am not forgetting guys like Gruber and Lecter, I just don't need to rehash them here - they are great and everybody knows it.
And of course I left off Ledger as Joker and Waltz as Landa, both of whom are absolutely no-brainers! Don't kill me!
This is because you must not have seen Frank Langella playing Dawg Brown in Cutthroat Island. Yes, yes, yes... Cutthroat Island has an abysmal reputation, being the biggest money-loser in the history of film and all... but at the end of the day it's actually a pretty entertaining (very very campy) pirate romp. And the best part of it is Frank Langella (though unfortunately I think he gets a bit less screen time than Geoffrey Rush did). I actually like Cutthroat Island just as much as Pirates of the Caribbean... it's just that it didn't take off in the mainstream (IMO) largely due to the lack of a charismatic leading man. Matthew Modine's character had all the screen presence of a wet towel. There's no Johnny Depp in this film. But that doesn't stop it from being fun. I especially like the fact that so many of the effects... weren't actually special effects. Believe it or not, they really did construct fully-functioning pirate ships, followed by really blowing them up (no, really). They also really did construct and then blow up buildings. And yet they wonder why the budget was so out of hand. Whoops.
How did I leave off Roy Batty - Blade Runner - Again, a sympathetic but completely ruthless killer. David Lo Pan - Big Trouble in Little China - Come on, he was just lonely, he just wanted a girlfriend.. Chinese, with green eyes.. is that so much to ask?
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