Played with the perfect blend of icy candor and manic desperation by Rutger Hauer, Roy is the menacing beating heart (do androids have hearts?) of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. Contrary to popular belief, a good antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be “evil,” which is a term that doesn’t really apply to Roy Batty. Kids love a good movie, but taking a family of four to the local theater can set you back more than $30 — and that’s without the jumbo tub of popcorn. If you need proof that women can be just as diabolical as men, look no further than the female lead of Gone Girl. There may not be much to him other than brute strength and a lack of remorse, but sometimes, that’s all you need to make an excellent bad guy. Be it older screen heroes like Humphrey Bogart or Errol Flynn to the more contemporary superhero craze, or even the (long overdue) evolution of the female screen hero, there’s little question that the world we live in finds itself in dire need of a steady supply of heroes. By the time Back to the Future III rolled around, it seemed like we’d seen everything that could be done with Biff, which is probably why the film featured his great-grandfather Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, the old West gang leader who tries to hang protagonist Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox).
Of course, Nazi baddies are a dime a dozen in film history, so it takes something pretty special to make one stand out. We deliver sports infotainments to our viewers the way no one ever did. Of course, there was little in the way of subtlety to Drago’s characterization, as the steroid-enhanced boxer literally ends Apollo Creed’s life in the ring, striking a symbolic blow against the United States in the process. Day-Lewis had already built a reputation for turning in memorable performances as cruel bad guys by the time Paul Thomas Anderson cast him in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, but his take on Plainview is much more than just a retread of earlier work. A sense of dread hangs over the entirety of There Will Be Blood, meaning that by the time Plainview murders his nemesis (Paul Dano) with a bowling ball in the final scene, it’s difficult to not feel emotionally exhausted and devastated. Everybody knows that you can’t have a good hero without a proper antagonist, but when will they get their due? Although Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) is for all intents and purposes the lead character in Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, he is definitely no hero.
Gladiator‘s most thrilling conflict lies with its hero Maximus (Russel Crowe) and his quest for revenge against Commodus, who ordered the execution of Maximus’s family, but the secondary conflicts surrounding Commodus’s own twisted relationship with his family is just as compelling. The evil commandant of Plaszow death camp, Goeth is the kind of guy who gets his rocks off by using Jewish prisoners as target practice. Superbly acted by Robert Helpmann (who contrary to what his performance may suggest actually adored children), the Child Catcher works so well because he preys on our real-life fears of child abduction. Seriously, his name is literally just “the Child Catcher,” which while a succinct summation of his role in the film is also extremely disturbing. The reason the Child Catcher stands as one of the film’s greatest antagonists is because of how unsettling his entire persona is. We couldn’t believe how many awesome antagonists we managed to come up with, but we’ve successfully whittled it down and ranked the 25 most notorious bad guys in the history of cinema.
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