Paths of Glory.
Heartbreaking so but a great story.
Animal Farm
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Fallen
ETA: Well…maybe not best come to think of it. But it is one where the good guy fails :).
The Last Seduction
Cujo. I’m glad I read the book before I saw the movie.
Legion. I don’t want to spoil too much but the good guys and the bad guys are the same guys.
Original ending to Dodgeball.
I am Legend (some interesting debate here probably.)
Mr. Brooks is also a good one where the villain wins…and is the main character.
Against All Odds
As Good As It Gets
You’ve Got Mail
These are both movies where the male protagonists are selfish jerks whose behavior borders on the outright evil. They go through their respective stories unredeemed other than by one or two nice acts which they undertake for entirely self-serving reasons. Yet somehow, apparently by sole virtue of the fact that they are in ostensible romantic comedies, they end up getting the girl.
They get what they want, and they’re still jerks. We’re supposed to be ok with this. I, for one, am not.
Which one? The book The vampire society are perhaps bad because they’re neofascists. Neville isn’t necessarily good though, as the title suggests. The movie? The writers are clearly the bad guys for butchering the story (for the third time?). Okay, I’d say they won the box office.
Also, No Country for Old Men.
This is spoiler city, but I guess anyone would be a great fool to open the thread if they cared about spoilers, or (in my case) they were pretty confident that they had already seen everything.
My choice is a little-seen film with Michael Caine where he plays a guy who does some very bad things, gets away with it and lives happily ever after.
A Clockwork orange.
What do I win?
Rocky
*Being John Malkovich. *
Come to think about it, there’s the disturbing ending to Con Air, where Steve Buscemi’s serial child-killer gets away scott free, and that’s not even presented as a bad thing.
Michale Bay films tend to exist in a morality-free zone.
The bad guy usually wins in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, her observation being that all we put up against it is empty pretense and conceit.
The first 3 Terminator films. Sure, The Terminator gets destroyed everytime but the nuclear war still happens and the robots end up ruling the earth.
And Blackadder Goes Forth doesn’t really count. Nobody in the series is evil, just grossly incompetent.
Dexter is an obvious one.
Dexter, IMHO, is a good guy. In fact, he may well be the most moral character on TV - while other protagonists are instinctively good, Dexter has made a conscious decision to be so.