I watched The Terminal the other day(The Tom Hanks movie about the guy stuck in the airport)
But I just can’t get over how badly written Tucci’s character was. It was the most arbitrary case of sticking in an antagonist for the sake of having one. He reminded me of a D&D DM just deciding that the guy was there to say no, logic and reason be damned. He didn’t have a Javert like obsession with a principle. He had a bit of a stick up his ass but wasn’t a total rules wonk. He wasn’t a comic book asshole generally. He may have a had a reason for revenge after the goat medicine guy, but his attitude didn’t change at all. He was simply an arbitrary plot device to say "no"to the hero.
Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. Not always a NO person; he’s just famous for NO SOUP FOR YOU when customers try his patience.
Stan Smith, whenever he thinks his family is disrupting conservative American values.
Monsignor Orelas in Priest, played by Christopher Plummer. It seemed like his only role was to dress down the title character (Paul Bettany) and insist the vampires he fought didn’t exist.
Colonel Tighe on Battlestar Galactica’s main role was to be baffled by everything and yell “What the hell…” whenever anything happened, so that everybody else would look like geniuses for being able to figure out that the robots were the bad guys.
He also, more in keeping with the spirit of the OP, placed himself pretty squarely in the path of Starbuck and opposed her at every opportunity.
On TV crime shows, there always seems to be a “tough” police captain or lieutenant whose sole purpose is to yell at the hero, “This is not your case!!! Stay away from Joe Suspect!!!”
I was gonna say this. For a concrete example – Eddie Murphy’s boss in Bevery Hills Cop – his Detroit boss, not the Beverly Hills boss, who occasionally said yes.
In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the original with Gene Wilder; I’ve never seen Johhny Depp’s closet-pedophile version), the character of Slugworth was inserted specifically because they decided the film needed a villain. He’s not in the book, and IMHO really wasn’t necessary in the movie either.
I wouldn’t call it so much “needing a villain” as needing a way for Charlie to actively prove his goodness. In the book, he was simply the last kid standing–how would Wonka have known that Charlie wouldn’t have given in to temptation if he’d run into the right kind? He was awfully passive for a hero.
In the 1971 movie, he was a regular kid–not a nasty or ill-mannered one like the others, but perfectly capable of giving into a kid’s natural curiosity. (So was Grandpa Joe–an adult!) But the difference is, when Wonka confronted him about his rule-breaking, he manned up, realized that he had broken the rules and did deserve punishment, and refused to take the Gobstopper to “Slugworth” out of spite.
(I like the nuances of that scene. Wilder’s Wonka seems genuinely upset–one would suspect he wouldn’t have been so with any of the other kids, because he honestly expected better of Charlie. And Peter Ostrum’s acting in that scene is sincere–he wasn’t expecting Wilder, whom he’d really bonded with, to get that angry.)