Wings Hauser as RAMROD in “Vice Squad” and Russel Crowe in “Romper Stomper”
Me: “Will somebody kill this guy FFS!!??”
I remember seeing The Great Silence as a kid and being super pissed at the bad guy getting away with it:
Like I don’t think I even knew a film could have completely dark ending like that.
The Great Silence is one of my all-time favorite Westerns. The Italian cinema has always had political-minded filmmakers looking for ways to speak to the public through genre; from the mid 60s to 1970, Westerns were popular, so that’s the vehicle they used. Great Silence is a tremendously angry movie, with a lacerating political point (history is written by the victors, so be cautious about trusting your mainstream history books), but it’s not the only politically angry movie in its category. There’s a lot of garbage in the Spaghetti Western sector, but there’s also a lot that’s worthwhile. Very interesting genre worth exploring.
It might be awesome but I’ve never rewatched it since being traumatized as a 12-13(?) year old. And remember in those preinternet days watched it with absolutely no context. It was just some old western they were showing on BBC2 where the baddy(or goody I forget?) carries a cool Mauser pistol, so the ending was completely out of the blue. I still viscerally remember how pissed off I was at the time.
“Who kills Prince Humperdinck? At the end. Somebody’s gotta do it!”
Arlington Road, a sort of sideways remake of The Parallax View, except there is a face to the faceless baddies of TPV, and they get away with everything.
Not a movie but a book: After I finished reading “The Appeal” by John Grisham (whose books I usually like) I wanted to throw it across the room. Apparently he wanted to make a point about what a bad idea it is to elect judges, and to that end the book ends with the bad guys winning.
I hope this doesn’t hijack a perfectly good thread topic, but I often find myself rooting for the bad guy to get away with it, especially if it’s an especially elaborate caper or a satisfyingly odious target.
I think that’s normal, and it’s often the way the storytellers want you to feel. It’s natural to empathize or identify with the viewpoint characters, and to want plans to succeed.
I Care A Lot. I was so frickin’ mad through 99.9 % of that movie. Sheesh!
Egor Korshunov in Air Force One. I was happy to see him get what he deserved.
This is the reason is why I stopped watching House of Cards (so maybe the story beats changed, who knows). It’s not fun to me to see someone always be a successful evil genius when they don’t have any good competition.
Kind of related to this. Its ridiculous the admiration Hannibal Lecter gets from the movies (and books). Putting aside the whole ‘He’s a cannibal psychopath’ thing. The He Has His Own Twisted Moral Code and is polite to those who treat him with respect is almost exclusively for Starling (and Barney I guess)
He’s petty as fuck when it comes to Will. (again in the movies and books, not TV). He refuses to accept that Will caught him pretty much through luck. It eats at Hannibal. He tries to goad Will and is just flat out rude to him. And Will’s polite attempts at explaining things just angers Hannibal even more.
Toy Story 4. If it hadn’t been for the ending, it would have been just an unnecessary but slightly cute money-grab movie. But then the bad guy wins, the heroes go through what they said was a horrible fate for toys, and continuity got thrown out.
The rare instances of the bad guy getting away with it are an antidote to the revolting uniformity (especially in pre-1960s movies) of the bad guys/criminals always being caught and either getting killed or sent to jail.
*“We must emphasize to our audiences that crime never pays, otherwise civilization will come to an end.”
What instantly leapt to mind: Pacific Heights. I think Michael Keaton gets it in the end, but it took way too long for comfort.
Have never quite worked out why Blondie in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” gets classified as good.
Not a movie but it’s pretty infamous, Call of Duty: Ghosts ends on a “Bad guy wins” ending only because the developers automatically assumed the game would be such a success it would inevitably spawn a sequel, but it was both the lowest reviewed and least money making Call of Duty game of it’s generation so we’re all stuck with it’s crappy downer of an ending forever.
The problem with it was that the main bad guy Rorke was just some generic evil special forces soldier who somehow had the mid-2000s “The Bad Guy Has A Plan So Complex It Requires Every Single Person To Follow It Unintentionally To The Second For It To Work But Somehow It Does” plan that was famous at the time. The final battle with Rorke is patently absurd, dude gets a fire extinguisher to the back of the noggin, gets shot with a .44 Magnum revolver at close range in the upper chest, gets caught unconscious in a rapidly sinking ship that your character only just barely escapes and doesn’t see anyone else surface, but what happens in the final seconds of the game? He somehow appears BEHIND you out of nowhere, easily disarms you despite nursing a massive bleeding bullet wound, and is somehow healthy enough to be able to drag your unconscious body away to prison.
The ending (among other things) was enough to make people rise up in complaints that caused them to basically scrap Ghosts 2 and just reboot the franchise after that.
RDR2
Dutch: “I have a plan!”
Ever see a movie where the bad guy gets away with so much it makes you mad?
I had to open this to make sure it wasn’t Dougie posting…
We had a poster who would get SO angry at a character getting away with something, or even acting rude to people, in a movie.
It started with bad guys winning, but soon expanded to good guys not following rules of politeness. And we soon realized he was not separating film from real life.
He went on at great lengths about how Michael J. Fox’s movies should be banned, because he hangs onto the back of a truck while on his skateboard in BTTF. He said MJF could’ve been killed, and impressionable children would emulate him.
No amount of reasoning would convince him that the actor wasn’t really doing those stunts, let alone recommending it to kids.