Knight Of Cerebus / Live-Action Films

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• Bad Boys (1995): Fouchet is a wrathful French gangster. Despite the film being a comedy, there's absolutely nothing funny about him, and every time he appears, the film loses its comedic beats. By gunfire.
  • Bad Boys for Life: Isabel Aretas is arguably the reason behind the Darker and Edgier tone of the movie, because she was the ex-girlfriend of Mike and wants him dead for abandoning her, and she's also responsible for killing Captain Howard.
• Jason Bourne film series:
  • Eric Byer from The Bourne Legacy is the one who created all the technical on the programs and despite some occasional moments of humanity, demonstrates a cold, calculated detachment when he has operatives and anyone whose involvement threatens to publicly expose any of their work, killed in manners varying from setting up a suicide, drugging a scientist so he commits a mass shooting, sending assassins meds that poison them and sending an assassin whose been chemically enhanced to have no empathy.
  • CIA Director Robert Dewey from Jason Bourne turns up the seriousness of the film, and while the Asset does most of the heavy lifting, he is operating under Dewey's command. The fact that Dewey is responsible for the events of the series also turns up the seriousness. He also goes even further than Conklin, Abbott, or Vosen in terms of ruthlessness, such as killing off agents as he goes along.
  • The Asset himself is a far more villainous than other henchmen Bourne took down in previous films; he cold-bloodedly murders multiple civilians and even CIA officers who stand in his way to do Dewey's dirty work.
• Baron and Baroness Bomburst, the Big Bad Duumvirate in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, are played primarily for laughs. But their More Despicable Minion, the Child Catcher, more than makes up for it. As evidenced by that name, he's scary to parents as well as to kids!
• While Die Hard 2 was a serious movie to begin with, Col. Stuart causes a planeful of people and children to crash and burn and he even manages to deliver a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to McClane in the climax.
• For much of the film, Dune: Part Two feels like a dramatic, but still traditionally heroic struggle of underdogs Paul and the Fremen against the unambiguously evil Harkonnens. Once Feyd gets involved in the conflict on Arrakis, however, his brutal tactics force Paul to resort to darker methods to defeat his enemies, and the full horror and tragedy of Paul's story comes to the forefront.
• The titular Evil Dead in Evil Dead (2013) is definitely more serious then the demon in the previous ones.
• Suarto Rahmat starts off Expend4bles by attacking the home of a Libyan general before killing him and his family after they surrender the nuclear weapon, and he also comes the closest to killing Barney Ross.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) has King Ghidorah. It's definitely no exaggeration, as while the other Titans are natural disasters, Ghidorah himself is a living extinction event and genuinely the most evil of all the monsters.
• The Hangover Part III: Marshall is a drug dealer with a grudge against Chow for stealing half of his gold from a heist. Though Kingsley had shades of this in The Hangover Part II (it turns out he was an Interpol agent after Chow the whole time and never actually a threat), Marshall is shown killing a name character onscreen and constantly and bluntly threatening the Wolfpack to a point that it's clear there's a Dead Serious threat established like there wasn't really before. That said, he's shown to actually be willing to honor deals and agreements and only turns on them when he thinks he's been betrayed.
• The Hitman's Bodyguard: Dukhovich. His scenes at the Hague are not played for laughs, and his introduction where he ransacks the home of a professor before executing his family while he's Forced to Watch as well as the climax where he blows up the Hague after he's found guilty are pretty horrific.
  • The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard: Much like Dukhovich from the first film, there isn't anything funny about Aristotle, and his introductory scene of him suffocating an EU diplomat and him shutting down an entire city are treated fully seriously.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is particularly dark, but things become extremely bleak once our heroes arrive at the titular temple and face Mola Ram, who may well be the most evil villain throughout the whole Indiana Jones franchise, which is quite the accomplishment in a franchise that features Nazis and Adolf Hitler himself. It's pretty telling that he's the only villain who dies by Indy's direct doing, instead of having a Karmic Death like the others.
  • The mood darkens significantly in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny when Jurgen Voller appears. Where the previous films' villains had some humorous or campy moments, Voller is dead serious at all times and he's much more prone to pointless bloodshed than them - with the exception of Mola Ram.
• James Bond:
  • Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the nefarious leader of SPECTRE, has proven to be the number one Arch-Enemy Bond has faced so far, showing a willingness to condemn the entire world if he doesn’t what he wants, a tendency to kill minions for the slightest of mistakes (with a peculiar preference for playing mind games with those he's about to make into an example for the rest), and getting his hands dirty if cornered. He even does the most notorious Kick the Dog moment in the franchise in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, when he personally kills Bond’s wife Tracy on their honeymoon, all to spite 007 for foiling his Evil Plan.
  • For Roger Moore's last Bond film, A View to a Kill, we see Bond facing Max Zorin, the psychotic Corrupt Corporate Executive who, in one scene, sets off a bomb inside a mine with hundreds of his own workers still inside, and then shoots down those trying to escape all while laughing his head off. The Lighter and Softer Moore era was over, indeed.
  • In Licence to Kill we meet the overly ruthless drug lord Franz Sanchez, who beats his girlfriend with a whip and has her secret lover's heart ripped out. After being captured by Bond and Felix in the opening, he later escapes from jail, maims Felix and murders his wife, setting up Bond's Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Throughout the movie, as Bond starts getting under Sanchez' skin, the villain starts killing his own henchmen in some rather gory methods like making one explode in a decompression chamber and impaling another on a forklift. Even compared to the Daniel Craig movies, Licence is arguably the darkest Bond flick of all.
  • Spectre took it up to eleven with Franz Oberhauser AKA Ernst Stavro Blofeld not only being revealed as the mastermind behind everything since Casino Royale, but also Bond's estranged foster brother who committed Patricide out of pure envy and jealousy for the time his father spent with Bond, drills holes into Bond's head out of pure sadism, and forces him into a Sadistic Choice in which Bond has to save Madeleine from the former MI6 building in three minutes before it blows up. Disturbingly enough, he is the darkest version of Blofeld, and possibly one of the vilest villains in the franchise, as he's a far more brutal and ruthless madman. And the ways in which he does Cold-Blooded Torture shows the extremely insane nature of this psychopathic monster, as he's only doing it to get a sick kick at 007's expense, all the while gleefully enjoying it regardless of the manner he does it.
  • No Time to Die tops them all with Lyutsifer Safin, who murdered Madeleine Swann's mother, and years later, has developed a mutagenic weapon threatening the world, and he does the one thing no other Bond villain did: he kills Bond himself.
• Jurassic Park
  • In comparison to previous dinosaur antagonists, the Indominus Rex from Jurassic World is the most threatening, homicidal, intelligent, depraved, and frightening. She also had managed to kill Hammond expy Simon Masrani, who only wants to delight the visitors much like Hammond and dies trying to stop this dino from going on a rampage, which shows how much a dangerous threat she is that not even the park owner can stop her and dies trying to.
  • In turn, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom brings us the absolute worst of the human antagonists: the greedy Eli Mills who plots to capture all the remaining species of dinosaurs and no matter how dangerous sell them off to the highest bidders AKA international terrorists and criminals.
• While Frank D'Amico of Kick-Ass; is responsible for the serious shifts in tone throughout the first movie, his son Chris is played more seriously in Kick-Ass 2 and D'Amico's brother Uncle Ralph D'Amico is far worse than either one.
• Lethal Weapon:
  • Lethal Weapon (1987): While most of the other villains are in some minor way laughably evil, the General has absolutely no comedic moments and darkens the tone (and music) of the film whenever he appears.
  • Pieter Vorstedt in Lethal Weapon 2 leaves a very high body count, killing over a half dozen people.
  • Wah Sing Ku in Lethal Weapon 4 is one of the most brutal villains in the franchise, let alone the film, especially when he nearly kills both Riggs and Murtaugh in the climax.
• Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road is easily the darkest of the Mad Max villains. While the villains in the first two were just motorcycle gangs and the villain of the third was trying to run a town with order, here, he is a downright sadistic dictator who rules over the Citadel and farms people for their blood and milk, even owning a group of sex slaves and will stop at nothing to get them back when they escape from his clutches.
• Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: Queen Ingrith turns out to be a cruel witch who makes Stefan look tame in comparison. Seeking to annihilate all fairies because of an extreme distrust and prejudice toward them, Ingrith curses her husband the same way Maleficent had cursed Princess Aurora (eternal sleep) in order to not only get him out of the way, but to also frame Maleficent and incite a war against fairies where she gleefully has numerous innocents killed with a poisonous red powder. Fairies are also targeted for extermination in a church too and Ingrith even tries to kill Aurora in order to save her own skin in the end.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thanos is easily considered to be the darkest and most threatening villain in the MCU to date. He has entire planets and nations who fear his power, both Loki and Ronan were visibly frightened by him, even telling the latter he would 'bathe the starways in his blood' if he failed him and not to mention he's considered the most powerful being in the universe and immortal by certain people. He is absolutely dreaded and hated by his daughter Gamora and Nebula who he would make fight each other everyday and when Gamora won, Thanos would take apart Nebula and replace her flesh and blood with machines to make her less 'weak'. By the time he became the Big Bad in Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos succeeds in his goal to kill half the universe, which includes half of the Avengers and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
  • Thor: Ragnarok might be Denser and Wackier, but Hela is a very big threat and the film gets serious whenever she's on screen. Thor: Love and Thunder one-ups it with Gorr the God-Butcher, a scary Tragic Villain who literally takes the color out of the movie when he appears (some scenes in his Shadow Realm are downright monochrome!).
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: Kang the Conqueror. He doesn't show any of the humorous traits exhibited by his Alternate Self He Who Remains, being Faux Affably Evil at best, making him a far more serious threat to Scott and company than either Yellowjacket or Ghost — all fitting for a villain who's set up to be the the next major Big Bad after Thanos. It's significant that the first trailer for Quantumania is rather fun and whimsical until Kang shows up — at which point all humor stops. In the film, Scott tries to preserve his line in snarky backchat, but Kang No Sells every joke made in his presence. He even lacks quips, the main source of humor in the MCU, which even Thanos dabbled in occasionally.
    Kang: Let me make this easy for you. You will bring me what I need... Or everything you call a life will end.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary. Good lord, the High Evolutionary. While he's not as powerful or far-reaching as Thanos or Kang and is (for the most part) pretty useless in a fight, he's quite possibly the scariest MCU villain ever put on screen. He's an Evilutionary Biologist who has delusions of creating a perfect society (which he has total dominion over) and there is nothing he won't do to accomplish this. He's a sick, twisted monster with no sense of humanity or morals and much like Kang, any trace of humour found in the movie screeches to a halt the second he's on screen. That he's responsible for most of the awful things in Rocket's life only adds to his detestable nature and even the Guardians themselves want nothing more than to bring him down. The Reveal of the horrific mess that is his true face is probably one of the darkest scenes in all of the MCU.
  High Evolutionary: Incinerate them.
• Boris from Men in Black 3 is FAR WORSE than Edgar and Serleena, who were both pretty nasty, since he's Agent J's father's murderer and Agent K's in the modified '69.
  • Serleena and Boris are more or less equal in evilness, since both engage in on-and off-screen multiple planetary genocide.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series:
  • Mission: Impossible III has Owen Davian, a ruthless Arms Dealer who's made it personal to hurt Ethan in the most painful way possible, later fulfilling his promise when he kidnaps and tortures both Ethan and his wife Julia, and even going as far to physically beat the crap out of Ethan in the climax.
  • Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation has Solomon Lane, another personal foe of Ethan who is also one of the most dangerous characters in the entire series. When he returned in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, he's just as dangerous as he appeared in the previous film, but also abandoned all his previous motives and became a Revenge Before Reason-filled Death Seeker trying to hurt Ethan again, and even brutally fights with Ilsa and Benji in the climax, nearly killing the latter.
  • Also in Fallout was Arms Dealer John Lark, a.k.a. August Walker. He's the first villain in the series to actually kill an IMF secretary, namely, Alan Hunley.
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning brings us The Entity and Gabriel. The former is a rogue A.I. that has the ability to bring the world to its knees in the blink of an eye and can manipulate modern technology, while the latter has a personal connection with Ethan Hunt and his past and even kills Ilsa in a fight to show how much of a threat both him and the Entity pose.
• Invoked by The Mummy (1999). After accepting the role of Imhotep, actor Arnold Vosloo requested that he be allowed to play the character completely straight, despite director Stephen Sommers envisioning the film as a mostly lighthearted and campy throwback to old-fashioned pulp adventure serials. Most critics agree that Imhotep was all the more effective as a villain because his serious presentation contrasted so starkly with the rest of the film's tone.
• Gmork in The Neverending Story. While the situation was already grim with the Nothing gradually destroying the world of Fantasia, his introduction causes the film's tone to go from hopeful to dark and intense. The scene where he confronts Atreyu is a nightmarish deconstruction of the nature of stories and imagination, revealing him to be an opportunistic nihilist working with the Nothing to destroy Fantasia in order to rule over the unimaginative masses left in the wake of the oblivion, which makes Gmork's evil feel more personal and vile, while the Nothing behaves more like an uncaring natural disaster.
• Given Patriot Games to be Darker and Edgier then the other Jack Ryan features, amongst the terrorist antagonists, the IRA and Ax-Crazy Miller are the most darkest, violent and brutal villains in the film series, especially Miller, the IRA cell's Revenge Before Reason-driven Psycho for Hire.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The series became significantly darker in its second film with the introduction of Lord Cutler Beckett. Davy Jones isn't really played for laughs either.
• This trope is actually Inverted in Power Rangers (2017). Once the Kaiju Goldar appears, the movie's tone goes from a somber teenage angst flick to the cheesy, over-the-top action that Power Rangers is known for. That said, Rita Repulsa in this version is still significantly darker and far, far less Laughably Evil than her TV counterpart with the numerous killings she commits leading up to the climax.
• Predator: The Predator's presence is dealt with very seriously and drains quite a bit of the campy comedy out of the movie when it arrives. Rather fitting considering the team members are in their comfort zone against human opposition, hence their general levity, but once the Predator turns up and makes it clear they're outmatched, they find themselves in a much more dire and unfamiliar scenario.
• Rambo:
  • Major Pa Tee Tint from Rambo IV is more brutal, sadistic, psychotic and noticeably disturbing than the previous Big Bads or previous kinds of villains all together. The graphic outcomes of the atrocities he committed are absolutely played for horror and makes the past villains' sins pale in comparison. He's the complete 180 degree contrast to Teasle if comparing Tint's large amount of Kick the Dog acts to Teasle's large amount of Pet the Dog acts.
  • Unlike the other villains, Hugo Martinez from Rambo: Last Blood not only finds out about Rambo after stealing his driver's license, but he's also the first villain to hurt Rambo personally by kidnapping and killing Gabriela.
• Return to Oz was already a dark film, but when the Nome King finally made his appearance, the film gets even darker as the Nome King raised the stakes for Dorothy and her friends and even ( briefly) managed to capture most of Dorothy's friends in his deadly game. Mombi was pretty bad herself, especially with the infamous "head scene," but she doesn't quite match the Nome King in terms of evilness.
• Among the Rocky antagonists, Ivan Drago leaves the darkest impact — namely, Apollo's death and Rocky's Career-Ending Injury.
  • Of all three of Donnie's main opponents in the Creed series (including Ricky Conlan and Viktor Drago), Damian Anderson in Creed III is the only one that is an active threat in Donnie's life.
• Star Trek reboot movies:
  • John Harrison/Khan from Star Trek Into Darkness. If you thought Nero was nasty, he pales compared to this guy.
  • Krall from Star Trek Beyond. He's perhaps the darkest villain in this timeline thus far. Even Khan had his Deadpan Snarker tendencies, while there's nothing funny about Krall.
• Due to this entry being Darker and Edgier, Mick from Sudden Impact is a more depraved and sadistic threat then the previous Big Bads and the later one in the next film.
• While Venom: Let There Be Carnage tends to be like a buddy comedy for the most part, the tone turns to horror whenever Cletus Kasady is around, especially after he becomes Carnage.

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