The Third Rambo movie? I mean - the mujaheedin go on to become the Taliban, don’t they? Hell, OBL was one. Rambo ultimately allowed 9/11 to happen!
Would ‘Lucky Number Sleven’ count? After all
the guy you think is just in t6he wrong place at the wrong time throughout the film turns out to have set it up. And whilst most of the people killed are criminals, there’s the one guy right at the start who is killed merely because he has gambling debts to the people the ‘hero’ is targeting.
Push, as an American, do you also feel it was justified 230 years ago? If not, what was the difference?
Do you mean ‘justified’ as in Britain fighting a war to keep the colonies? Of course.
The two situations are not totally analogous… (I just woke up I have no idea if I spelled that right.)
Allowing for serious liberties, the Emperor character was relatively historical. Both in the ‘utter bastard’ and the ‘necessary to form China’ point of things. The sympathetic point of view was unique, and I found, a very interesting interpretation of the traditional view.
If it had been a less kung-fu and more arthouse movie, the plot points and philosophy would probably have been accepted more. Still, I tend to be a tad post-deconstructivist about such things, accepting and understanding the various origin points of various elements of culture, and appreciating how they were reformed into new art, so I really found it a fantastic job.
Then there’s always The Wizard of Oz… Dorothy takes out a contract for a hit on the WWotW just so she can go home.
Plus she kills her sister as soon as she arrives in Oz.
The Long Goodbye
Marlowe kills his best friend in cold blood.
Heh, just watched an old Buster Crabbe western (Wild Horse Phantom from the Creepy Cowboys Collection) that fits the bill. The hero convinces a prison warden to let a gang of outlaws escape (!) in the hope that they’ll lead him to the stolen loot they’d hidden before getting caught (the money belonged to impoverished ranchers). They “escape” in a hail of gunfire and force another prisoner to come along with them. This other prisoner - a young man imprisoned for some minor offense - is subsequently murdered by the outlaws but other than a few sad words being spoken when his death is discovered, the incident is glossed over and everything ends happily. Um, okay. Good plan, hero-man.
I do think that *Hero *is an interesting example, and one where you do have to bring in something from outside the movie. Specifically, you have to know that the King of Qin was a real, historical character, and was viewed for almost all of Chinese history as a horrible monster; for 2000 years, he filled the role that Hitler has played in the West for the past 60 or so. As far as I can tell, the current Chinese government is deliberately trying to re-write the myths and recast him as a heroic unifier of his country.
So, who is the hero, and who is the villian? Sometimes it is hard to tell.
Maybe The Last Samurai—If not for Tom Cruise and his actions with the rebel Samurai, Japan might have ended up a full ally—or at least, a vassal—to the United States.
So—maybe Tom Cruise isn’t completely responsible for the rise of Japanese ultranationalism and militarism, and the pointless, nightmarish slaughter of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific…but I think we can safely say that he had enough of a part of it that his character’s bones should be dug up, tried for crimes against humanity, and posthumously executed. It’s the only way to be sure. 
Some of my suggestions…
Angel (TV Series)
The entire fourth season of the Angel TV series had them fighting against a plot by The Powers That Be to bring lasting world peace to Earth
The Boondock Saints left it open to interpretation as to whether the Brothers MacManus were really on a mission from God Himself to kill all the evil men in Boston, or if they were just a couple of drunken crazies who went around killing people who happened to be bad men.
In Pitch Black, it originally appears that Johns is the white hat heroic police officer who will protect them from Riddick, but it is later revealed that not only is he not really a cop (bounty hunter with a fake badge), but he is also more than willing to sacrifice the others so he can survive. In the end, the apparant villian, Riddick, ends up helping the few survivors escape the planet.
I’m going to have to pull back from that and chalk it up to irrational prejudice on my part. It’s been a while since I watched JPII, but I came away with the impression that Nick was acting, if not on her orders, then with her nod-and-wink consent.
Good one.
Some more:
Prison break:
The brother intended to kill the guy, so he is morally guilty. Thus Scofield is just helping a large group of guilty people escape prison.
House of Spirits (the movie):
The “hero” male character actively supports a communist revolution
Right, I withdraw that one.
I still must comment on this
So you think war can be justified from both sides? That sure is a pro-war sentiment.
[QUOTE=Raguleader]
Some of my suggestions…
Angel (TV Series)
The entire fourth season of the Angel TV series had them fighting against a plot by The Powers That Be to bring lasting world peace to Earth
Hmm… I think that’s more a case of morally ambiguous action by the heroes. Angel & Co. weren’t acting out of selfish motives in fighting the Beast and Jasmine. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that a creature who began by raining flaming meteors on LA and proceeded to blot out the sun didn’t have the best intentions in mind. And once they were fighting Jasmine, it was because they realized the cost of her peace was the free will of everyone in her sway–not to mention the fact that she was eating more and more people as time went on. This was more a case of fighting a villain who thought she was heroic.
Jabootu notes another example of the “designated hero” in Man’s Best Friend, wherein a reporter played by Ally Sheedy breaks into an animal experimentation lab and frees a dog, which turns out to be a real killing machine. The movie overlooks the fact that, if she hadn’t broken into the lab and set the animal loose in the first place, no one would have died. And the lab operator (Lance Henriksen) is the “designated villain” simply because anyone who performs medical research on animals is just obviously evil.
And how about a movie like Syriana? Are there any good guys at all?
In the movie Deterrence, Kevin Pollack plays a former Vice President now acting President after the President’s death. He’s on the campaign trail when he and his entourage become trapped by a snow storm in a remote diner. While there, Iraq invades Kuwait. Most of the troops are tied up elsewhere, so Pollack issues an ultimatum, “Stand down or I’ll nuke ya.”
The bulk of the movie involves the tensions between the Prez and his advisors, as well as the diners trapped with them, and world leaders via satellite phone. In the end, though…
…the Iraqis didn’t back down and launched their weapons. But the Prez - in conjunction with the President of France - had long previously arranged the sale of these weapons to the Iraqis, and knew they were duds. So after the duds dropped and the ruse revealed, the crisis is effectively over. But Prez launches the nukes anyways.
I don’t think there are supposed to be good guys in Syriana, which rather disqualifies it from the thread. If there are no clear moral delineations being made, it’s impossible for such delineations to be mistaken, no?