Card Carrying Villain / Film

"If God was a villain, he'd be me."

— Benedict, Last Action Hero

Animated

• Red, the Big Bad of All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, loves being bad so much, he has a Villain Song about it called It Feels So Good To Be Bad. Kinda justified because he's a demon from the pits of Hell.
• In Anastasia, Rasputin gets a few lines in "In The Dark Of The Night" that indicate that he knows he’s evil. He refers to his curse as a "dark purpose" and he tells his minions to "let their evil shine". All things considered, he would have to be even more insane to fail to see how making a deal with the forces of Evil would make him evil as well.
• Gnorga, the Queen of Trolls in A Troll in Central Park, even goes so far as to sing a Villain Song about what a nasty person she is and how much she enjoys it ("It feels delicious, to be so vicious, I'm Gnorga, the queen of mean!"). When she explains why she hates Stanley so much, she angrily complains "He is kind, he is good, he is gentle... and, he is giving a bad name to trolls everywhere!"
• Despicable Me not only has the main character Gru — who, in an Establishing Character Moment, makes a balloon animal for a sad child and then pops it — and his rival Vector, but takes place in a world where card-carrying supervillains are common enough to have their own bank to finance their schemes (most of which seem to involve stealing landmarks).
• Many Disney villains are far too self-deluded to even think of labeling themselves as villains or just flat-out don't care. There are exceptions, though:
  • Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty, who, magnificently and scenery-chompingly enough, proclaims herself Mistress of All Evil which is true in a supernatural way, since in her world even a mere killing frost bears her personal touch.
  • Captain James Hook from Peter Pan is well aware he's a ruthless pirate and proud of it, with his own admitting that he "is not a very nice person".
  • Mad Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone. She sings a whole song about how wonderful it is that she's proud to be mad and evil, and she takes "terrible" as a compliment (and finds it lovely when someone's sick—though she doesn't find it so lovely when she gets sick later... though that may be because the cure of fresh air and sunshine disgusts her).
  • Ratigan, The World's Greatest Criminal Mind, from The Great Mouse Detective. Seems to have stolen the title from Lex Luthor.^note Or vice versa, given that it's set about a century before Superman. His Villain Song involves his minions adoring him for having concocted a plan that's supposedly even worse than the time he drowned some unspecified widows and orphans. In his case, its not just evil on its own that he prides himself at being, but specifically he wishes to be seen as combining the intellect of a cultured gentleman and the power of a criminal mastermind.
  • Aladdin's Jafar doesn't carry quite as big a card as Maleficent, mainly because The Grand Vizier can't actually say he's evil (though he ALWAYS is), but he doesn't seem to take offense when called "Your Rottenness" or "Oh Mighty Evil One" by his parrot and... calling him a snake leads to an epic Insult Backfire.
  Iago: "That's Sultan Vile Betrayer to you!!"
  • Emperor Zurg in Toy Story 2 is a true Large Ham of a Disney villain and proud of it.
  • Bowler Hat Guy from Meet the Robinsons aspires to be one of these. He's not very good at it.
  • Beauty and the Beast has Monsieur D Arque, a creepy man who runs an asylum and goes along with Gaston's plan partly because he gets bribed, but mostly because he likes how despicable it is, as he admits. Also, while Gaston is normally more of a Narcissist than a card-carrying villain, there is the line in the "Gaston" song reprise "No one plots like Gaston, takes cheap shots like Gaston, plans to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston!"
• Glisten and the Merry Mission features a pair of wolves who are on the naughty list and take great pride in it in contrast to Grizzly who had become The Atoner. They even express disappointment when Grizz tells them he has gone nice.
• Jasper, the main antagonist of The King's Beard, bosts a personal philosophy according to which "the Selfish One is the Clever One", as he exposits in his Villain Song, and he cheerfully describes himself as a "psychopath".
• President/Lord Business from The LEGO Movie loves to revel in his evil plans, and looks forward to freezing the world so no one will ever mess with his stuff again. He's actually a caricature of a young boy's Control Freak father, who's more Obliviously Evil.
  Business: Now my evil power will be unlimited! Can you feel me?!
  Robot: I can feel you.
  Business: Whoo! Nothing's gonna stop me now.
• Megamind turned to villainy after failing to gain his peers' respect for his genius. He discovered that he quite enjoyed it — to the point where, when he finally triumphs over the Superman expy and takes over the city, he quickly grows bored and wishes things were back to the way they used to be.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Forget cards — "Big" Jack Horner practically carries a neon sign on his back complete with fireworks, loudspeakers, and a Las Vegas Bellagio-style fountain that screams, "UNREPENTANT VILLAIN" from every angle — and he not only knows it, but relishes in it. When the Ethical Bug calls him an irredeemable monster, he's not even offended, just annoyed that it took the Bug so long to figure it out. He's committed so many evil deeds that during his death, he wonders which one of his heinous acts specifically was the reason why he deserves his fate.
• Strange Magic: The Bog King seems like an obvious case as he's a hideous insect humanoid ruling over an assortment of goblins, sits in the dark, threatens his minions, sings a song about how he's evil, and kidnaps a harmless fairy princess. He's more of a grumpy Anti-Hero. He's correct that the fairy kingdom has stolen the ingredients of a love potion from his kingdom and is worried about the harm the love potion can do.
• In The Swan Princess, Rothbart sings a song about being evil, appropriately titled, "No More Mr. Nice Guy." It even ends with the line, Bad guy I was born to be.
• The Chief Blue Meanie in the movie Yellow Submarine insists that his minion Max never say "yes". Because "we Meanies only take 'no' for an answer", and gets extremely angry at the sound of the word "yes", even when being answered in the affirmative. Sometimes, his own aggression gets the better of him and he needs to be revived with "nasty medicine", which makes him even more eccentric than he already is. He encourages his army of Meanies to be as unpleasant as possible, but later admits that his cousin is "the bluebird of happiness".
  • The Chief subverts his "No only" order moments later when he summons the Flying Glove:
  Chief: Come here, Glove. Look out there and what do you see? Tell him, Max.
  Max: Someone running, Glove.
  Chief: Yes. But you'll soon put a stop to that, won't you Glovey? Go, Glove, point and having pointed... pounce, go!
• The witches in My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) have the requisite nastiness, though the two daughters are something of a disappointment to their mother, who laments that they didn't turn out evil enough. This sets up their motivation: wanting to prove that they can too be evil if they want to be. Or rather, each one wants to prove that she can be evil and that the other is just as much of a fuck-up as their mother surmises. This explains why their scheme — unleashing what can only be described as a cartoony shoggoth made out of mood slime upon Dream Valley — is strictly of the Destruction variety, compared to other villains from the franchise who wanted either control or some magical artifact that the ponies just happened to hold the key to producing or finding, or both.
• Nigel, the cockatoo from Rio is sadistic, hammy, and enjoys every moment of villainy. His Villain Song tells it all.
  Now I'm vile, I am villainous, and vicious, oh and malicious.

Live-Action

• Wes Mantooth from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. In the second movie, after Jack Lime points out to Wes that carrying out his threat will require him to kill himself as well, Wes proudly replies that he already knows he's going to burn in Hell for his sins one day, so he's not afraid of a little additional burning while on Earth.
• Parodied with Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, who went to evil medical school and is disappointed that his son wants to be a non-evil veterinarian... or perhaps work in a petting zoo. And when Scott does tries to think like a villain, he spouses thinking like a No-Nonsense Nemesis, which annoys the Doctor to no end.
  Dr. Evil: An evil petting zoo?
  Scott: You always do that! (Storms off)
  • Later in the movie:
  UN Representative: Mr. Evil–
  Dr. Evil: DOCTOR Evil! I didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called "Mister", thank you very much.
  • The Running Gag between him and Number Two is that Number Two has turned Dr. Evil's front companies into incredibly profitable enterprises (at one point even at least bowing to the Doctor's ideals a bit and creating a Hollywood casting agency, which is vile and profitable), but the moment Dr. Evil arrives it's back to the schemes to Take Over the World and/or putting it under ransom with unprofitable prices (one million dollars in The '90s where that's only a tiny fraction of what they earn legitimately, then one hundred billion dollars in The '60s where "that amount of money doesn't even exist") – which will waste lots of money and lead to Powers destroying everything.
• Basic Instinct: Catherine Tramell admits that she has always been pure evil and likes it that way.
• Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, who even shouts "Kill the heroes!" It is also worth mentioning that his only non-ice-related pun in the whole film is identifying himself and Poison Ivy as "Adam and Evil". Freeze's case is particularly troublesome, as he gets the sympathetic background that could (and does, in other media) make him an Anti-Villain.
• The titular character in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon aspires to be numbered among the great "supernatural" serial killers like Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. He even remarks at one point that the world needs evil characters like himself and his fellow slashers, which is why there is always one survivor to tell the story.
• While not the main villain, or even doing anything horrendous (when you take the film's nature into consideration), some of Fat Sam's goons in Bugsy Malone proudly sing about just how rotten they are in the aptly named song "Bad Guys".
• In the horror movie Cabin by the Lake, the Serial Killer Stanley Cauldwell makes sure all his victims see a message seconds after they are kidnapped that makes it absolutely clear that he knows he's a monster: "I'M THE GUY YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU ABOUT"
• In Cats, Macavity shows up much earlier than in the musical, and gets in on part of the Villain Song that was originally sung about him, not by him. This means he gleefully describes himself as "the Napoleon of crime" and a "monster of depravity."
• Chinatown: Noah Cross is a particularly serious, realistic, and horrific example of this trope. He's fully self-aware of his wrongdoing, but he doesn't care.
  "I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING."
• In The Christmas That Almost Wasn't, Prune hates compliments and kindness and enjoys being called evil.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022): Once Captain Putty is outed as working for the main antagonist of the film, they immediately drop all pretenses of being an upstanding person and freely admit to being a greedy jerk who is Only in It for the Money with absolutely no shame whatsoever.
  Ellie: Stop [the Big Bad], Captain! You're better than this!
  Putty: (cheerfully) No I'm not!
• In the 1987 Dragnet movie, the villain heads the organisation P.A.G.A.N. - People Against Goodness And Normalcy. (And they literally use calling cards.) However, it's a bogus group intended to get the populace riled up about having card-carrying villains in their midst.
• In the two Dr. Goldfoot spy-spoofs, the eponymous villain cackles hammily about how evil he is, as only Vincent Price could do it.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness: None of the villains make any pretense about their vileness, and defend it on Social Darwinist grounds (if they even bother).
• The 'cult' (see The Other Wiki) film Evil Roy Slade features this in spades. He even yells at one of his henchmen who stays loyally at his side when the law offers a reward for him. Before that operation, he goes over the basics for his gang: 'Sneaking, Lying, Arrogance, Dirtiness and Evil. Put them all together and they spell "Slade!" '
• Aside from his name, Jean Vilain in The Expendables 2 makes his group's symbol a goat's head which is shaped like a pentagram, and refers to it as the pet of Satan.
• Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg from The Fifth Element is a great example, though he tries to justify this behavior by claiming that life comes from chaos and, therefore, destruction actually creates and improves life.
  Vito Cornelius: You're a monster, Zorg.
  Zorg: [Smirking] I know.
• Ming The Merciless in the 1980s Flash Gordon movie: if there is a Villain cliche, he plays it. Note that "The Merciless" is the title he picked out for himself.
• Wilson Croft from Flubber. "I'm petty and corrupt... I have profited from your ideas. To be honest, I'm here this weekend to steal your fiancee and make her my wife."
• Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II. "Now is the dawning of the season of evil..." and etc.
• Sardo Numspa from The Golden Child.
• High Life: Dibs is the doctor on a starship crewed by death row prisoners, who have been told that they will be pardoned if they complete a dangerous mission. In one scene, she tells the other crew that they are all thugs and losers, "but my crime was worthy of the name."
• Marv in Home Alone is this, much to Harry's disgust. He leaves the water running in every house they rob as a Calling Card because "all the great ones leave their mark, we're the Wet Bandits!" He continues this behavior in the second movie, changing to the "Sticky Bandits" after using a double-taped glove to rob coins.
• In Hudson Hawk, when Hawk asks Big Bad Darwin Mayflower who he is, Mayflower shoots back, "Isn't it obvious? I'm the villain."
• The Jade Faced Assassin, a kung-fu film, have a Carnival of Killers consisting of ten members, who literally introduces themselves as such.
  "We are the Ten Killers of the Martial World!"
• In classic James Bond movies starring Sean Connery, the top villains are brought together by an organization named SPECTRE - that stands for "Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion".
  • The Big Bad of Spectre, Franz Oberhauser a.k.a. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, makes no secret that he was behind all of Bond's miseries.
• Oba from the second ''Female Prisoner Scorpion'' film, Jailhouse 41. She's very quick to exaggerate her own badness compared to the legendary Sasori (the titular character), but her crowning moment of evilness is the point at which she outdoes all the other women present in describing the crime for which she was imprisoned: she drowned her two-year-old son and then stabbed her unborn baby to death, because her husband had an affair. She hikes up her dress to show off the scars... and keeps it up and in everyone's face for what seems like an eternity. She absolutely embraces this persona and the fear it engenders in almost everyone, and ultimately dies still muttering about going back to her home island, burning down everyone's house, and stabbing them all.
• In Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, Betty is the loyal enforcer of the Evil Council. And there's also the fact that he is formally known as Master Pain.
  Mayor: Master, what exactly is the Evil Council's plan?
  Betty: It is evil. It is so evil. It is a bad, bad plan that will hurt... many people... who are good. I think is great, because it is so bad.
• Benedict in Last Action Hero knows he's a villain and has no problem showing it. Of course, he's an actual villain in the Show Within a Show Jack Slater IV. Once he gets out into the "real world", he realizes it works by different rules (such as the cops not showing up immediately after he shoots a random guy on the street, and the neighbors not caring) and tries to subvert many villain tropes, except, of course, for the Evil Brit, the Evil Is Hammy, and the Evil Gloating ones (he can't exactly help the former, and the other two are too ingrained into him). He's played by Charles Dance, who also played the card-carrying Big Bad in The Golden Child. However, he does express disgust when he suspects a prostitute trying to come onto him might be underage.
  Benedict: Gentlemen. Since you are about to die anyway, I may as well tell you the entire plot. Think of villains, Jack. You want Dracula? Dra-cool-la? Hang on (takes out the magic ticket), I'll fetch him. Dracula? Huh. I can get King Kong! We'll have a nightmare with Freddy Krueger, have a surprise party for Adolf Hitler, Hannibal Lecter can do the catering, and then we'll have christening for Rosemary's Baby! All I have to do is snap my fingers and they'll be here. They're lining up to get here, and do you know why Jack? Should I tell you why? Hmm? Because here, in this world, the bad guys can win!
• The Last Boy Scout: Milo is fairly self-aware about his role as The Dragon.
  Joe: You're the bad guy?
  Milo: I am the bad guy.
• In the 1998 Lost in Space movie, the main antagonist, Dr. Zachary Smith, does it several times:
  Evil knows evil.
  Let me tell you a lesson about life, kid. There are monsters everywhere... I know, I am one.
• In The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the First Chinese Emperor's motive for taking over the world is, get this, that he hates freedom.
• Parodied in Muppets Most Wanted, where one of the villains is named Dominic Badguy and has a literal card with his name on it. And justified, because the business card is due to him posing as a promoter.
  Badguy: It's pronounced "Bahd-Gee." It's French. It means... "Good man."
• Dr. Decker from Nightbreed is proud to be a Serial Killer, calling himself "death, plain and simple."
• In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger absolutely revels in his work, perfectly happy to acknowledge how sick and twisted he is. However, he is after revenge for the vigilante justice he received, so he does have some delusions of justice. Though he eventually did succeed at his Ghostly Goals... and continued killing anyway, since, hey, it's fun, and just because his revenge is complete, that doesn't mean he can't just go on slaughtering.
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  • Brought up in this exchange in the first film:
    Will Turner: You cheated!
    Jack Sparrow: Pirate.
    • In that case, it was more because Jack was being pragmatic than evil. As he points out later, the only things that matter in the world "are what a man can do and what a man can't do", and points out that if he'll die in fair combat, "well then, that's not much incentive for me to fight fair, now is it?"
  • Blackbeard in the fourth film.
    Phillip: You are killing her!
    Blackbeard: I'm a bad man.
• Bluto in the Popeye film, who has a song number boasting of his being mean.
• In Prisoners, Holly Jones is revealed as one of these - and a pretty messed up one to boot - doing what she does (kidnapping and murdering children) to "crusade against god."
• Early in Rambo IV, Major Pa Tee Tint tells parents of boys he kidnapped to recruit for his army to fear him along with hearing and believing him.
• In Rolli – Amazing Tales, the High Priest of the Trashers is open about the fact that he wants to destroy the entire Rölli Forest by polluting it and converting its inhabitants into the Trashers' ranks. He does this in the name of evil and the Great Trash, the Trashers' hideous deity.
  The High Priest: We believe in the Great Trash, the Almighty Destroyer of the world, begotten by carelessness, born of greed. Oh, Great Trash! Wilt thou take these two as thy servants and baptize them as Trashers and Spreaders of Filth?
• Lampshaded and then fully embraced by Tony Montana in Scarface (1983) in the restaurant scene.
  You're all a bunch of assholes, you know why? You don't have the guts to be what you want to be. You need people like me! You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say 'That's the bad guy!' What that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide. How to lie. Me? I don't have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy!
• The self-identified Seven Evil Exes from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
• The villains in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are as card-carrying as it gets. "WE HATE JOY. WE HATE LOVE. WE LOVE MONEY." "[I am] such a dirty, dirty old man!", etc.
• Scream: While most of the Ghostface killers are delusional or hide behind their motives, two of them are pretty open and accepting of their villainy.
  • Mickey Altieri from Scream 2 makes no attempt to excuse or downplay his violent behavior, and actually wants to be caught because he wants his trial to become the trial of the century. And he even makes it clear to Sidney that the motive he plans on giving at his trial is complete bullshit and he just kills because he enjoys it.
  • Jill Roberts from Scream 4 openly admits to being a monster after The Reveal. While she wants to be seen as a hero like other Ghostfaces, she knows very well she isn't one. And while her selfish motive does involve Sidney, she doesn't outright victim-blame her like past killers.
• Chucky becomes one in Seed of Chucky:
  Chucky: As a doll, I'm fucking infamous, I'm one of the most notorious slashers in history. I am Chucky the killer doll, and I dig it!
• Queen Bera, ruler of the title cities in Sodom and Gomorrah, thoroughly enjoys working and/or torturing the salt mine slaves to death, and encouraging the same avarice and wickedness in her subjects. Her main motivation for allowing the Hebrews to live in Sodom in the first place is to take delight in corrupting them, then nudging Lot toward killing her brother Astaroth to allow her to rule unchallenged. After Jehovah frees him from Sodom's dungeons, Lot makes one last appeal to Bera's better nature, telling her that if she and her citizens don't repent their sinful ways, Jehovah will destroy them all. But she has no better nature to which to appeal; as she tells Lot, "What you call sin, to me is virtue. And all-powerful Death, whom you hate, I worship."
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)'s Dr. Robotnik dances to the song "Where Evil Grows", and when the power blows out in his lab, we see that his circuit breaker has labels for "Badniks" and "Evil Lab". So yeah, he's fully aware that he's the villain of the story.
• Dark Helmet in Spaceballs tells Lone Star, "Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
• The Green Goblin's appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home takes his card-carrying villainy from his first appearance and rams it home. He has a dozen reasons, petty and not, to try to murder the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of Peter Parker, but he kills Aunt May for what he calls "the crime of virtue" of taking pity on Norman Osborn when he was wandering the streets of New York like a homeless man when he appeared in the MCU's Earth.
• Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • A somewhat... jarring variant in the first Spider-Man film where the Green Goblin makes Aunt May finish the Lord's Prayer.
    Aunt May: Deliver us...
    Green Goblin: (dramatic entrance) FINISH IT!!
    Aunt May: From EEEVIL!
  • Venom from the third film states "I like being bad. It makes me happy."
• In Star Wars, the Sith philosophy can be summarized thusly: 1.) The practicing individual is unfettered by any sort of conventional morality, laws, or system of ethics. They can do whatever they want, indulge in every vice, and commit unspeakable crimes (and are encouraged to do so by the texts themselves); and 2.) The imposition of a dictatorial system of government which muzzles the populace, crushes dissension, and reduces the people to a near slave status.
  • Kylo Ren turned to the Dark Side because he wants to be the next Darth Vader, however, unlike Anakin, he wasn't manipulated into falling to the Dark, but sought it out himself. But, unlike Palpatine, who was completely and totally engulfed in the darkness, Kylo still feels the pull of the Light Side. In short, he continuously feels the battle between good and evil within himself, and consciously, deliberately chooses evil every time. In The Last Jedi, he goes through an arc which sets up a Vader-style Heel–Face Turn and comes out the other side more evil than before.
  • The main antagonists of the prequel trilogy are, in order of appearance: Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Darth Tyrannus, and General Grievous.
    Mr. Plinkett: Also aboard the ship is Commander Nefarious, Captain I'm-A-Bad-Guy, and Admiral Bone-To-Pick... but they don't mention them.
• Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor in the Superman Film Series proudly declares himself to be "the greatest criminal mind of our time!"
• The Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie: President Koopa freely admits to Mario and Luigi that he is "one evil egg-sucking son of a snake.^note ...Did I lie?"
• The main villain of Time Bandits is the embodiment of evil and referred to simply as "Evil". It's interesting to note what the screenwriters consider evil. He's obsessed with efficiency, technology, and work. (Not to mention plastic slipcovers.) At one point, he laments feeling "good", and his minions sympathize.
• Collins, the mercenary leader in Triple Threat (2019) claims not to have a soul, and comments that he didn't set out to be a murderer, but that he is good at it.
• Played for drama in Unbreakable. The crippled Elijah Price sees himself as such, judging by his rant near the end of the film, where he self-identifies as a supervillain called "Mr. Glass".
• Unforgiven: William Munny has become this by the end of the film. When Daggett calls him a "killer of women and children", Munny proudly agrees without hesitation, then adds "I've killed just about everything that walks or crawls at one time or another."
• Virtual Combat: Dante, with his obviously evil voice, evil laugh, and evil demeanor. Unsurprising, since he is a literal villain developed as the Final Boss for a virtual reality fighting game who found a way to escape into reality.
• 1979's The Villain, a western comedy with Kirk Douglas as the hapless, Wile E. Coyote-esque titular character. He considers himself the villain, he will take the damsel from Handsome Stranger, he will cackle a lot. The damsel actually takes pity on him because, let's face it, real-life Wile E. Coyote-style backfires ''hurt'’.
• The Djinn of Wishmaster is patently aware that he is pure evil. He states he can't be undone because his presence perpetuates evil in the world and his Badass Boast to Alexandra when she wishes to know what he is is equal parts horrific and illuminating.
  Djinn: You wish to know what I am? To you, I am this: The cry of the abandoned child. The whimper of the whipped beast. I am the face that stares back at you from the shadowed mirror. The hollowness at the heart of all your hopes, Alexandra. I AM DESPAIR.
• The Wizard of Oz: After Dorothy accidentally melts her with water, The Wicked Witch of the West screams, "who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?"

---