Also by Thackeray: Barry Lyndon. The protagonist is a total bastard, much worse than in Kubrick’s movie.
Hmmm, I’ll have to try that one-I loved Vanity Fair.
He hurled the Enterprise to the far reaches of space which led to an encounter with the Borg that cost the lives of several crew members. That’s a little notch above mischievous I think.
Marc
How about Breaker Morant?
The movie may have been about how governments fail their soldiers, but, still, they were liars and killers.
Absolutely; that movie had at least four villains as heroes, and I still quote the radio voice over at the end of that car chase.
That would be Richard III, the opening soliloquy, And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
One could argue Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing; the man was a sadistic murderer.
Or, for that matter, just about any Clint Eastwood movies.
I would say that the protagonist of Fight Club is a villain, but probably shouldn’t say more about it than that for fear of spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t read/seen it.
In Bruges (an excellent movie) has as its main characters hit men. Just because one of them feels bad about a killing he’s done (accidentally) doesn’t make him any less a villain.
Would the murderer of Roger Ackroyd be a good example?
Tony Soprano is not a villain. He’s a multidimensional character who has a lot of good things about him and a lot of bad things about him. His cheerful demeanor and sense of humor and avuncular personality make him likeable, the fact that he suffers from anxiety attacks makes him sympathetic because a large portion of society at large shares this with him, and he’s a good father. He makes a living through crime but he is never shown to be a sadistic guy and he is never shown to enjoy killing - the crime is just a means to an end. Amoral, yes. Villainous, no.
There ARE villains in the Sopranos. Phil Leotardo, the New York rival of Tony, is the primary example. There are also guys like Ralphie and Richie who operate within Tony’s own organization but are trying to undermine him, and who are much more sadistic and much less sympathetic as characters than Tony.
He was stimulating mankind and preparing them for bigger encounters to come, to save the race a few crewmen died.
Jack Torrence in The Shining.
Mischief doesn’t have to be innocent. In fact it rarely is.
Most of the classic mischief figures in myth, legend and literature create situations that often lead to great body counts. Rarely are those body counts intended, but the trickster’s actions are usually a proximate cause of the deaths. I don’t think it makes the trickster necessarily evil, either. An inability to consider consequences may lead to what we’d consider criminal culpability, but intent matters a lot more when dealing with whether someone is a villain or not.
ETA: For the OP, the movie Killing Time features a LOT of villains, and one anti-hero. The central character really is the female Italian hitwoman. And she’s completely amoral. That she’d been hired by a ‘nominally’ dirty cop to kill a psychopath makes her a bit sympathetic. And that she’s mostly killing people attempting to kill her makes it more so, but looking at her actions, and reactions, it’s hard to see her as anything but a villain.
How about Moorcock’s Elric? Often a villain, always an anti-hero.
There is a (nigh impossible to find, out of print) book called Villains by Necessity. The general gist is that the world has been becoming more and more good, darkness is basically unheard of and evil is sealed away. A druid ends up finding that the tip of balance is, to use a cliche, too much of a good thing. Reality becomes ferociously unstable and to preserve the world from unraveling the druid gathers up villains who have to release/bring back evil.
The protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Zombie is a Jeffrey Dahmer-esque serial killer, and the novel is in first person. Very disturbing.
C.S. Lewis’ novel* The Screwtape Letters * is the correspondense of a senior devil to a minor tempter in how best to seduce humans to sin.
The movie Natural Born Killers is about a crazy young couple (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis at their career best) who go on a killing spree.
Similar in some ways to Man Bites Dog is The Last Horror Movie, a simulated documentary about a serial killer.
ABEbooks has 57 copies listed for sale, if anyone’s interested. 
I’d say The Ladykillers counts. The protagonists are a group of thieves using a nice, somewhat befuddled, old lady’s home to plan and stage a robbery. The remake is okay but doesn’t have the charm of the original.
I respectfully disagree. The protagonist is simply the main character of a story. It’s a term that comes to us from Greek drama. Yes, the antagonist i the chief character opposing the protagonist.
The functional definition of a protagonist as one who initiates the action is useful to an extent in film analysis and screenwriting classes, but overapplication leads to problematic readings. Is God the protagonist of The Ten Commandments (the version starring Charlton Heston)? Certainly he sets everything in motion, but clearly the protagonist is Moses. The entire film is the story of his journey. Is Sauron the protagonist of The Lord of the Rings? He creates the Ring, loses the Ring, and starts the War of the Ring. He is the Lord of the Rings, but the protagonist is Frodo,
(itchy trigger finger there)
… but the protagonist is Frodo (although good cases could be made for other characters). Even though he spends much of the story being led about by other characters, his journey forms the bulk of the narrative.
It’s frankly easier to think of stories where the protagonist doesn’t initiate the action than ones in which he does. Usually there needs to be a call to adventure, either in a literal sense of of someone assigning a quest or issuing a plea for help, or in a more abstract sense of circumstances becoming intolerable due to outside forces. But whatever the back story may be, the protagonist eventually comes to drive his story, which is the one that matters.
In a dramatic sense, the hero is the main character and the villain is the main adversary, but as these meanings are already covered by “protagonist” and “antagonist,” it’s more interesting to go by the common usages of hero as someone with admirable qualities or a good person and villain as a scoundrel or evil person. That allows us to talk of protagonists who are villains and antagonists who are heroes.
An antihero is a main character conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities. An antihero could be a hero, villain, or secondary character. Han Solo is undoubtedly brave and resourceful, but his conspicuous (initial) self-centeredness and unchivalrous behavior qualifies him for antihero status.
Cites:
ETA: And I guess I’m not really disagreeing with Cervaise at all, since he did start with the qualifying statement “From a standpoint of formal structural theory in literary analysis…” His functional definition is a useful one in that context, but I think overapplication can lead to tortured readings in which almost every hero is an antagonist and the terms lose much of their usefulness.
Didn’t Gardner also do one from Grendel’s point of view? Yep. Grendel, 1972
Curiously, Wiki doesn’t list it in the Gardner entry.