“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture,” Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut in one of the interviews that makes up the seminal “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book. And as the man who brought some indelible villains to the screen, like Peter Lorre in “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” James Mason in “North By Northwest” or Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,” Hitchcock knew what he was talking about.
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But by this measure, if you were to look at major studio movies being released recently, you’d come to the conclusion that most of the pictures these days aren’t very successful. This summer has seen a string of villains who are in almost all cases forgettable, bland, poorly motivated or generally misguided, coming at the end of several years that has brought very few characters who can hold a candle to the likes of Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger and The Terminators. With the release this week of “Suicide Squad” (read our review), a movie that turns a cast of comic-book villains into heroes and yet, at least as per the marketing, hasn’t revealed who they’re battling, it felt look a good time to look into the state of modern villainy.
2016 has so far seen a pretty uninspiring selection of bad guys, with adversaries in major movies including a dull male model-type dude (Ed Skrein in “Deadpool”), a stereotyped Pakistani terrorist (Alon Moni Aboutboul in “London Has Fallen”), a faceless dystopian bureaucrat (Jeff Daniels in whatever the latest “Detergent” movie was called), and the millionth Oscar-nominated old white man to try and kill Jason Bourne (Tommy Lee Jones in “Jason Bourne”).
Where once we had Alan Rickman or Anthony Hopkins, now villainy is embodied by various murderous nerds riffing on Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg in “Batman V. Superman,” Daniel Radcliffe in “Now You See Me 2”), Aaron Paul from “Breaking Bad” as a treacherous spy in “Central Intelligence” or Christoph “increasingly diminishing returns” Waltz in “Spectre” and “The Legend Of Tarzan.”
A few movies have tried some interesting ideas that don’t really work —the twist behind Idris Elba‘s baddie in “Star Trek Beyond” is a good one, but it means that he spends most of the film anonymously snarling behind prosthetics. One or two have tried some good ideas that come close to working —Daniel Bruhl in “Captain America: Civil War” barely qualifies as a villain in many traditional respects, but nevertheless was well motivated and unlike most of what we’ve seen before. But in the end, the best-written and most fearsome villain of the year was probably a CGI tiger (Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book,” voiced by Elba), followed closely by the shark from “The Shallows.”
And while the last decade has delivered some truly iconic bad guys —Heath Ledger’s iteration of The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” J.K. Simmons’ demonic jazz conductor in “Whiplash,” Javier Bardem as bowl-cutted assassin Anton Chigurh in “No Country For Old Men,” Daniel Day-Lewis as oil magnate Daniel Plainview in ‘There Will Be Blood,” Waltz as Nazi Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds,” all of which won their stars Oscars— there’s been an essential blandness to many villains, with the Marvel movies being the worst culprits. Its bad guys fit into essentially two moulds: Respected Character Actor Shouting Under Heavy Makeup (Lee Pace in “Guardians Of The Galaxy,” Christopher Eccleston in “Thor: The Dark World”) or Interchangeable Corporate Scumbag (Jeff Bridges in “Iron Man,” Sam Rockwell in “Iron Man 2,” Guy Pearce in “Iron Man 3,” Corey Stoll in “Ant-Man”).
Beyond that, there are few memorable candidates. And perhaps more interestingly still, there are a number of films that chose to do without villains altogether, or at least give the impression along those lines. Think of recent Pixar movies like “Inside Out” or “Finding Dory,” or Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (where you could argue Marion Cotillard’s projection is the bad guy, but hardly in a traditional sense), or “X-Men: Days Of Future Past,” where there’s a vague swarm of killer robots created by Peter Dinklage but which never really pose a serious threat, or even something like “The Nice Guys,” which has plenty of sub-villains but never really throws up a single person in charge of the criminal conspiracy.