WANTED A few good villains
Where have all the good bad guys gone? Antagonists are getting criminally short shrift in recent films
Villains are bad. Just not in the way that you might think. Pop quiz, hotshot! Name the last film villain that really stuck out for you. Someone that made you truly revel in their badness. I am willing to bet it is the big bad from something older, because it feels like it has been a while since there has been a nemesis that really made a so-bad-it’s-good impression.
To set the evil bar high, our murderers’ row of topnotch villains are along the lines of Die Hard’s Hans Gruber, or No Country for Old Men’s cattle-prod-toting Anton Chigurh or prime-era, force-choking Darth Vader from Star Wars. Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight definitely counts. It just feels like it has been a while since we’ve seen a truly classic malefactor — one who turned evil into something delectable.
While the box office clearly hasn’t been affected by lacklustre villainy, the problem persists: heroes are defined by their villains and, with lesser enemies, our heroes just can’t live up to their best. Of course, they’re going to lose in the end, but let’s at least make the fight interesting.
It’s easy to see where the first bit of blame can go. We are living in the age of the superhero blockbuster, but out of all of the comic-book adaptations, other than the aforementioned Joker and Loki, has any member of anyone’s rogue’s gallery stood out? To be fair, Marvel is aware of its bad-guy problem, but really hasn’t done much to fix it.
“It always starts with what serves the story the most and what serves the hero the most,” Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studio told io9.com in February. “A big criticism of ours is that we focus on the heroes more than the villains, I think that’s probably true.
“In 2008, two superhero movies came out,” Feige said, referring to Marvel Studios’ first film, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight. “One focused on the villain, one focused on the hero and we at Marvel looked at them, like, ‘Yeah, we focus on the heroes. We don’t mind that. We like that.’ ”
Marvel is on a tremendous roll with its films, but what works in a monthly comic doesn’t do so well on the big screen. Due to the overarching plan to get to the next movie, incredibly powerful antagonists often become little more than the henchmen of other, supposedly more powerful villains that we’ll see in another movie or two. (Thanos, a Marvel heavy, was teased at the end of a 2012 movie; he finally arrives as a proper villain in 2018, more than 10 films later.) The narrative is always about moving the goalposts.
As well, many of these films — notably, the ones built around teams — are overstuffed, so the villains don’t get a lot of screen time to really develop.
It may sound like I’m picking on the superhero films — and need I say anything more than Suicide Squad if we’re talking about squandering villains on screen — but can you remember any of the bad guys in the recent Bond films? The two new Star Wars movies are also perfect examples. Does anyone fear whiny Kylo Ren? Can anyone name Rogue One’s Death Star bureaucrat who was basically a petulant plant manager from hell?
From Jason Bourne to Jack Reacher to the rebooted Star Trek, there have been many decent actors who end up as little more than inconsequential bad guys basically waiting to be dispatched by our heroes. ( Rise of the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern both tried to find drama in battling a big cloud from space.) Even the Fast and the Furious series’ best villain remains Vin Diesel’s Dom.
The focus on known commodities with franchises, prequels and reboots isn’t helping. When a villain is positioned to switch sides (e.g., The Winter Soldier in Captain America: Civil War or Jason’s Statham’s Deckard Shaw in Fate of the Furious) in subsequent films, they can’t be too malevolent.
And recycled villains tend to offer pale imitations. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Khan took out a starship in Star Trek Into Darkness with a hand weapon and still doesn’t hold a candle to Ricardo Montalban’s scenery-chewing original.
Also undermining the creation of compelling baddies: villains have become more complex. The area of study that has looked at this is called affective disposition theory, which basically says viewers make moral judgments about characters in a narrative that affects their enjoyment of the story.
“I don’t have data on this, but anecdotally, I think one of the reasons we are seeing lesser villains is that they are less binary in nature. The heroes we see are not purely good, they’re not white-hat heroes, they also have some elements associated with them that are not so good, or flawed in some kind of way,” said Matthew Grizzard, an assistant professor in communication at the University of Buffalo. “Villains are the same way, a lot of them now have some aspect that is likeable about them.”
Then there’s the rise of the antihero: If you want a really awesome bad guy, we know exactly where to find them — on TV, where he or she might be playing the lead.
Starting with The Sopranos, followed by Dexter and Breaking Bad, excellent TV shows made the villain into the hero, providing series-long, nuanced takes on bad guys. Dexter, in particular, did a good job of creating bad guys who were worse than the serial-killer protagonist — which is key to making the hero likeable but can also make us feel better about ourselves.
“If you had a really bad day and did something you weren’t proud of, you could go home and turn on a show that features moral ambiguity and bad characters — and feel significantly better about yourself,” said Mina Tsay-Vogel, an assistant pro- fessor of mass communication at the University of Boston, explaining her research to a campus publication.
“Morally ambiguous characters can actually make people feel better about their own actions in the real world. We call this term morality salience, which is making people aware of their own moral actions.”
Television series get more time to fill in the back story of the villains, which is one reason why making memorable ones can be tough.
“Villains don’t know that they’re villains. They think they are doing the right thing,” says Adam Reed, creator of Archer, who was in town recently to present at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference. “If you get into their shoes and empathize with them, and if you write them as if they are doing the right thing, I think that adds a lot of complexity and believability for the character.”
While I do think evil has taken a few days off, there still signs of darkness worth celebrating. Aliens and monsters are still pretty good, with the Xenomorph in Alien: Convenant and Stranger Things’ Demogorgon as keeping that bar high. Universal’s recent announcement of a shared “Dark Universe” — bringing back the likes of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Wolfman and more, starting with Tom Cruise’s upcoming The Mummy — suggests they see more life to be squeezed out of some classic monsters.
Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin from Netflix’s Daredevil was an interesting take at that character. Games of Thrones has done a great job with a number of bad guys. Fans are excited to see Cate Blanchett’s Hela in Thor: Ragnarok. Thrawn is a recently released Star Wars novel from Timothy Zahn telling the origin story of a fan-favourite villain from the (now mostly excised) extended universe. Darkseid and the hordes of Apokolips are coming for the Justice League. Tom Hardy was just cast as Venom in an upcoming stand-alone film for that SpiderMan villain.
Master of horror Clive Barker once said: “I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.” We will always need heroes. It is time for creators to put some work into making worthy villains step up and really put them to the test. Raju Mudhar is a Star entertainment reporter.