“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture,” Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut in one of the interviews that makes up the seminal “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book. And as the man who brought some indelible villains to the screen, like Peter Lorre in “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” James Mason in “North By Northwest” or Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,” Hitchcock knew what he was talking about.
READ MORE: #SquadGoals: The 20 Best Ragtag Movie Squads
But by this measure, if you were to look at major studio movies being released recently, you’d come to the conclusion that most of the pictures these days aren’t very successful. This summer has seen a string of villains who are in almost all cases forgettable, bland, poorly motivated or generally misguided, coming at the end of several years that has brought very few characters who can hold a candle to the likes of Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger and The Terminators. With the release this week of “Suicide Squad” (read our review), a movie that turns a cast of comic-book villains into heroes and yet, at least as per the marketing, hasn’t revealed who they’re battling, it felt look a good time to look into the state of modern villainy.
2016 has so far seen a pretty uninspiring selection of bad guys, with adversaries in major movies including a dull male model-type dude (Ed Skrein in “Deadpool”), a stereotyped Pakistani terrorist (Alon Moni Aboutboul in “London Has Fallen”), a faceless dystopian bureaucrat (Jeff Daniels in whatever the latest “Detergent” movie was called), and the millionth Oscar-nominated old white man to try and kill Jason Bourne (Tommy Lee Jones in “Jason Bourne”).
Where once we had Alan Rickman or Anthony Hopkins, now villainy is embodied by various murderous nerds riffing on Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg in “Batman V. Superman,” Daniel Radcliffe in “Now You See Me 2”), Aaron Paul from “Breaking Bad” as a treacherous spy in “Central Intelligence” or Christoph “increasingly diminishing returns” Waltz in “Spectre” and “The Legend Of Tarzan.”
A few movies have tried some interesting ideas that don’t really work —the twist behind Idris Elba‘s baddie in “Star Trek Beyond” is a good one, but it means that he spends most of the film anonymously snarling behind prosthetics. One or two have tried some good ideas that come close to working —Daniel Bruhl in “Captain America: Civil War” barely qualifies as a villain in many traditional respects, but nevertheless was well motivated and unlike most of what we’ve seen before. But in the end, the best-written and most fearsome villain of the year was probably a CGI tiger (Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book,” voiced by Elba), followed closely by the shark from “The Shallows.”
And while the last decade has delivered some truly iconic bad guys —Heath Ledger’s iteration of The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” J.K. Simmons’ demonic jazz conductor in “Whiplash,” Javier Bardem as bowl-cutted assassin Anton Chigurh in “No Country For Old Men,” Daniel Day-Lewis as oil magnate Daniel Plainview in ‘There Will Be Blood,” Waltz as Nazi Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds,” all of which won their stars Oscars— there’s been an essential blandness to many villains, with the Marvel movies being the worst culprits. Its bad guys fit into essentially two moulds: Respected Character Actor Shouting Under Heavy Makeup (Lee Pace in “Guardians Of The Galaxy,” Christopher Eccleston in “Thor: The Dark World”) or Interchangeable Corporate Scumbag (Jeff Bridges in “Iron Man,” Sam Rockwell in “Iron Man 2,” Guy Pearce in “Iron Man 3,” Corey Stoll in “Ant-Man”).
Beyond that, there are few memorable candidates. And perhaps more interestingly still, there are a number of films that chose to do without villains altogether, or at least give the impression along those lines. Think of recent Pixar movies like “Inside Out” or “Finding Dory,” or Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (where you could argue Marion Cotillard’s projection is the bad guy, but hardly in a traditional sense), or “X-Men: Days Of Future Past,” where there’s a vague swarm of killer robots created by Peter Dinklage but which never really pose a serious threat, or even something like “The Nice Guys,” which has plenty of sub-villains but never really throws up a single person in charge of the criminal conspiracy.
“the twist behind Idris Elba in “Star Trek Beyond” was a good one”
I stopped reading after this. I haven’t seen this movie. Try to keep these things spoiler free if there is no need to spoil a film (seems to me there is nothing else to say about this Beyond twist but “it was a good one”).
The answer is simple really. Because the same people are writing the same stories. “The Nice Guys” I’m sure was a great buddy cop film, but let’s not pretend we all didn’t think Shane Black was copying his “Lethal Weapon” days a bit. Suicide Squad looks to have Leto playing basically an extreme version of Ledger’s Joker (The voices even sound the same). I actually thought Adam Driver’s performance in “The Force Awakens” was mildly interesting. He gave it his all, playing a character who clearly looks twisted in knots on the inside. His facial expressions when he faces Han Solo were pretty impressive, he looks genuinely conflicted and on edge. But the basic issue is everyone is trying to emulate everyone else. That’s my point. You watch “The Hunger Games”, Donald Sutherland plays off Snow like O’Brien from “1984”, even if you haven’t seen 1984, the genetics are there. The dystopian dictator (Or symbol of it) who works to destroy the main character as a reminder even though the main character is utterly powerless and no real threat. Heck, in “Mockingjay”, Snow does to Peeta what O’Brien did to Winston in “1984”, mentally turning him against his love interest by torturing him with animals. Part of great writing is writers take their real experiences, their real life, and that uniqueness, created in real life through chaos theory where nothing is the same, and put that to paper. But Hollywood has such a framing device of what it is, what it’s films are like that nothing new can ever come of it. I’ve seen stories that fellow writers have made that are unlike anything else I’ve seen. And they won’t get published because Hollywood won’t take the risks. Not really their fault. Hollywood is a business that needs to keep the lights on. It’s ultimately the audiences fault for not taking risks. I could throw in some parallel here to life in general but I don’t want to distract from my point. Hollywood needs new talent, new blood. The best filmmakers and writers out there are doing indie films for $2 million a budget who work outside the machine to make their own works. Jeff Nichols is a major example, check out all his films and try to tell me otherwise. Five films, all five critically praised and well liked. Just saying, time to switch it up. Let new voices in.
*whew* you almost had me putting Kylo Ren in the header. He was the most interesting character in the movie.
Going after Sam Rockwell for Iron Man 2 is borderline criminal. The man is a goddamn joy in the midst of that nothing of a movie.
One idea I always had about movie villians is that the good, memorable ones really dominate the movie. Even when they’re not on screen, their presence can be felt. All the great horror/sci-fi movie guys like Predator, Alien, Terminator, Freddie, Jason. TDK’s Joker or Scar from the Lion King or Eve Harrington from The Lady Eve manipulate everything and every one to their advantage. Sometimes they just need a couple really stand out scenes by a great actor, like Laurence Oliver in Marathon Man or Orson Welles in The Third Man or Christopher Walken in True Romance. They also need to score a big win in the movie. Scar gotta kill Mufasa, Drago gotta kill Apollo, that prison Warden from Shawshank Redemption gotta kill Tommy.
I can go down the list ya know, Vader in ESB, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Commodus from Gladiator, Biff Tannen in BTTF, Gruber in Die Hard, Noah Cross in Chinatown, John Doe in Se7en, Agent Smith in the Matrix, Amon Goeth in Schildiner’s List, Nurse Ratchet in Cuckoo’s Nest, etc etc. These characters have a dominating presence over the movie’s world and our protagonists. They make their presence known. They are the ones controlling this world. They cant just be this anonymous vague threat waiting at the end of the movie.
Krall was a real shame, cuz Elba has the physicality and he gets that huge win over our heroes early on, but they wait so long for his motivations to become clear that he basically has no real presence in the movie’s big middle section until its time for the third act scrambling and punching scenes.
I think you mean “All About Eve.”
The best example of what you were saying about the villain’s presence being felt even when off-screen is Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Anthony Hopkins had a fraction of the screen time that Jodie Foster had, yet still won a Best Actor Oscar, because he dominated the film whether we saw him or not.
Other villains are memorable for being sly or deceptively charming, like Chris Sarandon in “Fright Night” or subtly manipulative like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
This is the most interresting list of keywords i havent read in a long time..
The most iconic villain of the last couple of years was Dr. Heiter from the Human Centipete
The problem with Movie villains is they have to be really really bad and right now, society is so terrible there is no way to portray that…R ratings wouldn’t be enough.
It’s pretty simple. Alan Rickman died, that’s why.
Simple, there is no talent anymore.