In many samurai films, it’s virtually impossible to know - and generally irrelevant - who is good or evil. The Sword of Doom (1965) features Tatsuya Nakadai in one of his greatest roles as Ryunosuke, a sociopathic master swordsman who joins a political faction (carrying out assassinations of rivals) and ends up slaughtering them. Good guy? Bad guy? Definitely way out of his mind. When it comes to playing insane a-holes, Nakadai has few peers, imo.
I mean, he literally raped McGregor’s wife. That makes him evil in my book.
It’s the type of cultural touchstone that I feel in my bones, the kind that can only root itself in the fertile soils of a preteen with a PG-13 joke on VHS.
That movie is damn near perfect. And Venkman was one of my earliest crushes.
Dean Vernon Wormer. He just wants the embarrassment that is Delta House off his campus.
Probably didn’t help that Otter “took a few liberties” with the dean’s wife.
Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) in Minority Report comes across as a bit of a dick/jobsworth but gets more sympathetic as the film progresses. He’s an antagonist to John Anderton (Tom Cruise), at least for a while, but is actually one of the good guys.
Venkman is kind of a jerk, too. He’s electrocuting one of his test subjects at the beginning. He’s rude to Janine, and fawns all over Dana.
Continuing the trend for academic administrators, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3, the Mayor (Harry Groener) is evil, Principal Snyder (Armin Shimerman) is just a weaselly asshole.
Principal Snyder: I mean, it’s incredible. One day the campus is completely bare, empty. The next, there are children everywhere… Like locusts, crawling around, mindlessly bent on feeding and mating, destroying everything in sight in their relentless, pointless desire to exist.
Yeah, I missed all that subtext when I was six.
You know, I’ll go to the bat for Ellis. Sure, he was a coked-up idiot, but he meant well, and all he wanted was for the situation to end without anyone else dying. Most importantly, he knew about McLane’s and Holly’s relationship, and covered for them anyway. His 120 bpm heart was in the right place.
That is possibly the finest summation of humanity I have ever read.
Whoever wrote that screenplay was a friggin’ genius.
Thank you for bringing awareness of that into my world.
Remember, he started out the film trying to seduce Holly:
HOLLY: Harry, it’s Christmas Eve. Families, stockings? Chestnuts? Rudolf and Frosty? Any of these things ring a bell?
ELLIS: Actually I was thinking more mulled wine, a nice aged brie, roaring fireplace, you know what I’m saying?
He’s basically the Bill Paxton character from True Lies:
Now there’s a real asshole. Man, I miss Bill Paxton.
Stranger
Well, I hate to be the asshole that just picks others’ choices apart, but…..Patrick McGoohan in both Braveheart and Silver Streak was an evil killer.
In the book, at least, the mayor of Amityville was in bed with organized crime and tried to keep the beaches open for their benefit.
I will submit Bill Paxton as Master Sargent Farel in Edge of Tomorrow.
Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed in Rocky. When I watched it a few years back, I marveled that Creed really wasn’t a classic bad guy. He didn’t lie, cheat, or attempt to steal anything from Rocky or anyone else. But Creed was arrogant, dismissive, manipulative, and patronizing towards Rocky, no doubt expecting their bout to be little more than an exhibition match that would end in an easy victory rather than a legitimate shot at his title.
THEY WERE ON A BREAK!
Sorry, that would be Amity in Jaws.
Amity means friendship
Even if that were true, Ellis was engaging in borderline workplace sexual harassment by not accepting Holly clearly declining his offer and following her around the office continuing to badger her. There is a reason the audience doesn’t feel too bad for him when he gets himself killed.
Stranger
Yeah, because he refers to Hans as buby.