What about the Kid? And there was nothing wrong with Lauren Graham’s character besides bad taste in men.
Being John Malkovich. With the possible exception of the title character.
Starship Troopers.
Most classic Gangster films had no good guys. Some include The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
That movie about Keyser Soze?
You mean The Usual Suspects.
Mel Gibson and cast.
Yeah, the title was escaping me. I suppose the cops were not exactly bad guys as such, but they were not notably good either.
I just thought of Léon: The Professional. Everyone was an asshole in that movie. Just like Dr. Strangelove, or A Clockwork Orange.
Unforgiven
Oh COME ON!!!
Merklin Muffley! An Asshole?
He was trying to calm Dimitri!
Mandrake?
Having maybe a slightly tougher time trying to bring GR to his senses?
Seriously, though, I’d say that the Bruce Willis character is as close as the film gets to a “good guy”. Yes, he kills his opponent in a boxing match - by accident - and he executes a man who came to murder him, but he also goes back into a dungeon of horrors and rescues the guy who was just trying to kill him, simply because it’s the right thing to do. What more do you want from him?
The Ref, maybe.
For the last time, there is no Keyser Söze!
Fight Club?
The Mel Gibson movie Dragged across concrete seems like it was made deliberately to win this thread.
The “protagonist” is established early on as a crooked cop, and a massive racist (although the latter is possibly not deliberate). He chases down the perpetrators of an armed robbery / kidnapping and everybody, including “protagonist”, tries to take the money from the robbery and kill everyone else, even when the killing part is wholly unnecessary.
I would say “spoilers” but, *spoiler*, the movie is an absolute turd that makes you somehow hate Gibson and Vince Vaughn even more than you did already.
So I doubt anyone will mind the plot spoilers.
Let’s not confuse good with nice. For example, someone mentioned The Hateful Eight above, and I’d argue that Kurt Russel’s character John “The Hangman” Ruth was a good guy, but he was a bounty hunter, chasing down violent criminals and returning them to justice to face their day in a court of law, and he was as hard and mean as he needed to be to do his job.
There’s direct on-screen evidence that, under the right circumstances, John Ruth was a polite, affable man, if a bit rough-hewn around the edges. He warms to “Oswaldo Mobray,” Tim Roth’s character’s cover identity, and treats Major Marquis, Sam Jackson’s character, as a respected professional colleague after his professional paranoia is satisfied.
Well then let me clarify with my example. Mel Gibson was trying to take the money *home* and kill the perps so that he could not be exposed. He would absolutely be the villain in another movie, but in this one, everyone was equally the villain. Neither “nice” nor “good”.
Well you’re 66% right.
Billy Bob Thornton’s character is definitely portrayed as good-hearted, but simple minded and easily influenced by others.
While Blondie is less bad than Tuco or Angel Eyes, at the beginning he still kills three other bounty hunters so he can collect the reward on Tuco himself. And he repeatedly enables the murderer Tuco to escape justice, and defrauds the law by collecting the reward and then allowing him to escape. He’s hardly “good”; the title is ironic.