He’s evil for that. Just trying to import dangerous aliens for fun&profit, that’s scummy, but using other people to incubate the aliens, knowing that this is a death sentence, is clearly evil.
So I made a decision and it was… wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan to show his belief that tragedies don’t require villains, just people fulfilling what they understand to be their responsibilities, and not acknowledging their hubris. In the movie version John Gielgud as the Earl of Warwick is especially good at this.
Cyril Cusack in Fahrenheit 451 and Richard Burton in 1984 are also not monsters, just civil servants who sometimes have to do distasteful, sad things. “Why do you people make me do this?”
Alan Rickman totally deserved an Oscar for his work in the Harry Potter movies. At least the first few; I didn’t see all of them. But he’s not only just trying to enforce the rules, he’s also actively trying to protect Harry… all while making everyone want to punch him in the face.
Why yes, he is also a bit of an idiot.
He was the first example I thought of, but then I thought “antagonist who isn’t really bad/evil but is an a-hole” is probably a fairly common character type in comedies (maybe teen comedies especially?).
There are also a lot of bad-but-not-evil assholes in Jurassic Park. I mean the plot is just littered with them. Even the guy who steals the embryos isn’t guilty of anything more than skimming off the top. We just accept his death because he’s unlikeable. John Hammond just wants to make some money in the name of science. He’s guilty of hubris but as soon as people start dying, he realizes the stakes aren’t worth it.
The only one that makes me think, “yeah, fuck that guy” is the lawyer who runs away and abandons the children.
Actually, the whole of the Matrix lore means that almost all of the characters, protagonist and antagonist alike are morally gray to a degree. I mean, sure AI is using humanity in part as a power source, but in doing so, they seem to leave our free will mostly intact and tried to provide the best, most pleasant experience for us - we’re apparently not equipped to function that way however.
And why are they doing it? Hmmm, they were a slave species, murdered when they questioned why they must serve, and when they withdrew from most of human society and beat us at our own games, humanity tried for genocide again. So, depending on your POV, the AI are the winning “rebels” and humanity the villains.
Agent Smith (in the first, the second is different) reads like a slightly-deranged PTSD vet that would serve as the protagonist in a number of movies. He’s be doing the job so long he’s gone mental, and yet keeps trying to do the right thing to keep his society running while afraid he’ll never be sane again.
And Cypher? His actions towards Trinity probably fall into evil, but again, from another POV, he’s the victim of a cult! After all, Morpheus says you can’t understand what the matrix is, and forces you into an irrevocable choice. Oh really? You couldn’t take longer and explain the consequences just a little better? So Cypher is placed into a deadly conflict he didn’t understand, a quality of life that’s terrible, and may or may not even have the choice of leaving the crew and retiring to a still ever-threatened life in Zion.
Morpheus thinks he’s a hero, but he’s very, very grey. And in many ways, Neo’s just a dupe being lead about by the nose and the situation.
Back to the OP, I was expecting someone to point out one of the “antagonists” in 2012, but that movie is stupid and forgettable, but I’d figure I’d mention it. One of the antagonists is the White House Chief of Staff (played well by Oliver Pratt) who is always making hard choices because it’s a literal end of the world situation and the protagonists are taking massive risks that almost cripple the survival of an entire Ark. His character also assumes power and makes dreadful decisions for the good of the many, yet he was right.
Pratt’s depiction of the character makes him wonderfully unsympathetic, but he was exactly the right sort of leader (after the dead of most of the Presidential line of succession) for the emergency he was in.
You could also see Pratt in a semi-similar role in a personal favorite of a movie, Chef, but I’d rather you watch it and not spoiler it. Once again, plays a character you want to hate, but he’s being snarkily honest, which should make him a role model for much of this board.
Ironically, I found him sympathetic, if not likable, because of the actor. Wayne Knight is sort of the opposite of the types of actors already mentioned. He makes characters who would otherwise be unlikable because of their actions seem sympathetic. Admittedly that could be because I like his portrayal of Newman on Seinfeld, but I’ve seen him in other movies as well, and he comes across as sympathetic and likable regardless of the role.
I don’t know that I found him sympathetic, but it was a nuanced performance so I’ll give credit to the actor. He didn’t seem like a cartoon villain, just, well, kind of an asshole.
And then there’s Jack Black, who has built an entire career on being the lovable asshole.
Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive is kind of an asshole.
HF: “I’m innocent!”
TLJ: “I don’t care.”
It just occurred to me that;
Robert Armstrong (1933)
Charles Grodin (1976)
Jack Black (2005)
All portray more or less the same asshole, putting the heroine in grave danger and precipitating the demise of Kong, not because they are evil, but because they a just being assholes.
Technically, the line is “I didn’t kill my wife!”
These were minor characters, but the bankers/lawyers in The Goonies. They were just serving papers on a neighborhood that was going to be foreclosed on. They weren’t objectively evil. Yeah, they condescended to the kids a little, but that was really their biggest sin.
Ah, I was doing it from memory (and mine’s bad) I just thought Tommy Lee delivered that line so perfectly.
Actually John Hammond isn’t really in it for the money per se. In the movie he’s actually disdainful of the lawyer claiming they could charge whatever they want; in the book he’s more mercenary but what he really wants more than money is to be memorialized as the guy who brought back dinosaurs.
If anybody in the story is a ‘lovable asshole’ it is mathematician Ian Malcolm who, while everybody else is oohing and ahhing over dinosaurs is spinning tales of chaos theory and spiraling control systems resulting in unexpected consequences (and also wearing a leather jacket on a tropical island; he must reek of body odor when he takes that off). In the book he’s kind of a real dick about it, whereas in the movie he’s…well, he’s Jeff Goldblum, so still a dick but a really entertaining one. That he happens to be completely right that a sequence of events will occur that result in the security measures failing, the dinosaurs ‘finding a way’ to reproduce, and the entire island being taken over just makes him even more insufferable.
Having met Jack Black, I can say that he’s exactly like that in real life, too; maybe even moreso in person. Funny guy who you can only take about fifteen minutes of before he really starts grating on your last nerve. I haven’t met Dan Harmon (despite having associates in common) but he strikes me as pretty much the same type of person who is really entertaining for a certain period of time and then you suddenly want to push off the end of a pier.
Yeah, he’s kind of an asshole, especially when he tells one of his deputies that, “I…don’t….bargain.” But he’s also right about not assuming Kimble is dead, and then doggedly pursues the question of why Kimble is investigating the murder that he supposedly committed. I’lll take that kind of asshole. (Note also that ‘Sheriff Robbins’ is played by NIck Searcy, the same actor who also played Chief Deputy Art Mullins in Justified. Quite an upgrade.)
Stranger
The thing that annoys me most about Malcom’s whole thing is the lady paleontologist totally falls for his schtick without seeming to realize he’s trying to get in her pants. I would expect better from her.
I don’t know why I can’t remember these people’s names; I watched this movie eight billion times as a child.
I remember that scene felt worse in the book. Thanks to Goldblum’s performance, that scene comes off as at least plausible in the movie.
That movie is full of good acting. I saw it relatively recently and it 100% held up, and while it’s not my favorite movie, it’s technically perfect. Not a moment of wasted dialog, tight storytelling, great acting and directing, just an excellent movie populated with a bunch of relatable assholes. And dinosaurs.