Lack Of Empathy / Live-Action Films

• The 6th Day: CEO Michael Drucker is involved in illegal human cloning experiments that he claims are aimed towards the final goal of extending life. However, his fine words fall apart when Drucker (who is already a clone of his original self) suffers fatal injuries and his next clone is activated while the previous Drucker isn't actually dead yet. The 'new' Drucker not only strips his dying predecessor of his clothes, but when Adam Gibson- who has spent the last few days trying to protect his family from Drucker's minions- confronts the two Druckers, the new Drucker attempts to convince Adam that his vendetta is with the dying Drucker while the newly-created clone technically hasn’t done anything to Adam himself, demonstrating a shocking lack of empathy for himself.
• Batman (1989): The Joker lacks any empathy. This is especially apparent in the climax when, after Batman revealed that The Joker murdered his parents, and thus was responsible for creating him, he started to mock Batman's choice of words of explaining this fact, and dares to say, "How childish can you get?!" when summing it up.
• Beast (2017): Detective Kelly claims this about Pascal when he's a suspect for the serial murders, telling Moll that he doesn't truly love her and is in fact incapable of love. Pascal is revealed to be the killer and doesn't seem to feel any remorse for it, even claiming his victims were "nothing", but it's a bit more complicated as to whether or not he truly felt nothing for Moll.
• Big Game: Hazar seems completely devoid of empathy whilst being extremely polite, when he makes a civilian aware he's going to use him for target practice with a missile launcher or when he's captured his "prey" and doesn't care for Morris' horrified reaction to the idea of stuffing the President. Even when Morris complains when it appears they're victorious, Hazar encouraging him to be happy instead of anxious comes off as Hazar getting annoyed at Morris' behavior ruining the atmosphere. However, given that Hazar was actually a CIA operative loyal to a Well-Intentioned Extremist plot the entire time, it's ambiguous just how genuine this is.
• In Blade Runner, lack of empathy is an Informed Attribute of replicants. Blade Runners use an empathy test to separate humans from robots. The replicants we see are quite ruthless and occasionally sadistic, but only toward people they see as enemies. We also see several instances of obvious empathy from Roy Batty, their leader.
• Bumblebee: Tina shows no sympathy towards Charlie's grief over her dead father and even has the nerve to mock her over it to her face. Of course, this comes to bite her later on.
  Tina: This car is an embarrassment. You should have your dad get you a better one.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022): Sweet Pete couldn't care less about dooming the lives of numerous innocent toons who have done nothing wrong to him.
• A Cinderella Story:
  • Shelby makes fun of Sam for her Burger Fool waitressing job and remorselessly drives Sam to tears by having the entire school chant "diner girl" at her.
  • When Austin finds out that Sam is unpopular and a waitress, he completely rejects her, doesn't care that he cheated on Shelby on the night of the big dance, and never seemed to care about Sam's well-being in the first place.
• Contracted:
  • In the first film, there's Nikki. She's utterly callous toward Sam throughout the film. After learning Sam had been with a man (it was rape) she's disgusted and dumps her (it's uncertain if she realizes this, but if so doesn't care at all).
  • In the second film, this apparently was BJ's entire reason for spreading the virus. Although he also claims to have Knight Templar motive.
    BJ: A new beginning, an eternal night, wrath like never before cleansing society and all I ever wanted was to feel. To feel anything, pain, love, anger.
• The late Heath Ledger's summation of his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight, a "psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy."
• Downfall (2004): During the battle of Berlin, numerous Volkssturm soldiers that had been drafted just hours before unknowingly run into the crossfire between the German and Soviet positions. General Mohnke goes to complain that using random civilians with no military training just adds to the body count, and hampers any real combat effectiveness since they just get in the way. Joseph Goebbels, who controls the Volkssturm, says that he won't disband the Volkssturm, and outright says he feels no pity them, and blames them for the situation they're in since they supported the Nazis' rise to power.
• Ex Machina: Nathan's becomes increasingly apparent, and peaks when Caleb discovers videos of his previous creations breaking down and begging to be let out and it becomes clear that he doesn't care about the suffering of others.
• Five Nights at Freddy's (2023):
  • William Afton shows no remorse for murdering children, let alone strangling and then stabbing his daughter.
  • Aunt Jane wants to ruin Mike's life by taking Abby away from him out of selfish gain. She doesn't care that he is still suffering from his brother's disappearance, his mother's passing, and his father's departure.
• Girl, Interrupted: Lisa is in the asylum for this reason. A great example, when Susanna finds Daisy's body, Susanna breaks down, starts crying and flies into a panic, while Lisa goes "Well this is annoying" and searches Daisy's pockets for cash to steal.
• Angel Eyes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In a movie filled with people who are empathy-impaired, he's unquestionably the worst, lacking all emotions and desires save perhaps, Greed.
• Halloween's Michael Myers never displays any sort of emotion. This even goes so far as to make him seem impervious to his own pain.
• Pick any of the Big Bads in the James Bond franchise. They tend to be wealthy but criminally insane, greedy, and sociopathic Diabolical Masterminds. Some are even willing to kill millions For the Evulz. Notable examples include:
  • 007's biggest Arch-Enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the nefarious head of the Nebulous Evil Organization SPECTRE. Part of his Evil Plan often involves pitting powerful nations into fighting each other via elaborate Batman Gambits and False Flag Operations without them suspecting he was the mastermind. To him, profit is the only thing that matters when he's formulating a scheme. Everything else can burn down to the ground. If millions are killed, so be it, and he'll shrug it off as if nothing odd or unusual had happened. Who cares if his minions die as well? His schemes in Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever reveal the threat he poses.
  • His most recent incarnation in Spectre is even worse than his predecessors, as he committed patricide out of resentment for being favored less than an orphaned 007, causing him to orchestrate the events of Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall, and continues to torment Bond out of pure sadism.
  • Goldfinger, with the backing of Red China, intends to cause economic chaos in the West by nuking the American gold supply at Fort Knox. When Bond asks about the projected death toll of Goldfinger's plan (which reaches into the tens of thousands), he simply shrugs and remarks that "American motorists kill that many every two years".
  • The Big Bad of A View to a Kill, Max Zorin, is one of the worst examples of this in the Bond franchise, as he's willing to corner the microchip market by triggering an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, without regards to the millions of deaths he's about to create. He's also a Bad Boss, gleefully mowing down his henchmen all without a shred of remorse.
  • Octopussy: Renegade Russian General Orlov is a corrupt Soviet military official who wants to trigger World War III and isn't bothered by the fact that his intended bombing of a military base will kill thousands of innocent civilians.
  • Elliot Carver, the Big Bad of Tomorrow Never Dies, is willing to ignite World War III just to get broadcasting rights in China and jack up his news network's ratings.
• Iosef from John Wick kills the title character's puppy out of spite and shows no remorse for it. Even after his father explains to him that the puppy was a gift from his late wife, he still couldn't care less. When John finally catches up to him, all he could do is tell him that it was no big deal. Of course, this gives him an earnest Boom, Headshot! courtesy of John himself.
  Iosef: It was just a fucking [dog]—!
• Little Sweetheart gives us Thelma, a nine year old girl who will blackmail, stalk, rob, frame or kill you to get her way. She does not care if you are in pain, she does not care if you're having your life ruined, she wants whatever she wants. When her "friend" gets hurt early on, she shows no concern at all. It only gets worse from there.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain America: The First Avenger and Avengers: Infinity War: Johann Schmidt a.k.a. the Red Skull views other humans as ants. Why should a superior being care about something so insignificant? Ultimately, this ends up being his Fatal Flaw when it keeps him from ever being able to claim the Soul Stone for himself.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): Even by Kree standards, Ronan is brutal and shows no empathy towards others.
  • Ant-Man: Darren Cross does not care at all that he killed a number of his own employees trying to kill Scott, and even less that completely innocent people would likely die as a result of him selling the Yellowjacket suit to HYDRA.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Going hand-in-hand with his narcissistic personality, Ego's regard for lives other than his own is decidedly limited; he killed thousands of his own children when he realized they couldn't help his goal, he gave Meredith Quill a brain tumour when he realized he cared about her (considering that a weakness), and he thinks nothing at all of the countless lives that would be destroyed by his ultimate plan. That he describes the sensation of meeting life other than himself as "disappointing" speaks volumes.
  • Thor: Ragnarok: Hela displays no empathy at all for any other being save her wolf, Fenris. She wants to rule or kill everything that is not her and will not hesitate to kill entire worlds or her own people.
  • Avengers: Endgame: Both the past and present versions of Thanos completely fail to truly understand why people don't appreciate his "gift" of killing half of all life (when it consisted of murdering their friends and family and destroying their homes), nor why it didn't result in the universe being prosperous. He interprets these people’s grief and rage towards him as "ungratefulness". He doesn't take it well.
  • Spider-Man: Far From Home: The Big Bad, Mysterio, cares nothing for the potential lives that could be lost because of his machinations. On the contrary; he thinks that their deaths will attract more coverage.
  • Black Widow (2021) has Natasha's true Arch-Enemy General Dreykov. He could not care less for the girls he enslaves as his widows, mocks Natasha for both her desire to know where her mother is buried and for her guilt over some of her actions especially concerning Dreykov's daughter, Taskmaster and even Natasha, whose job is to deal with psychopaths and high-profile criminals, is disgusted by just how cold, unfeeling and apathetic to everything he is.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary's core problem as a person. He wants to "perfect the galaxy" without caring about the people he "perfects" or the consequences if he gets it wrong (which he usually does in one way or another). The general implication is that creating his perfect society is impossible because he wouldn't have any idea what healthy sapient interaction looked like if was wearing a nametag, had two forms of ID, and had its name tattooed on its forehead. This is perhaps best demonstrated when he sees Rocket crying over the death of Lylla as some kind of crying contest rather than an understandable emotional reaction to trauma.
• The Mechanic (1972): The sociopathy of the two hitman protagonists is shown in various ways. Arthur realizes Steve has what it takes to be his understudy when the latter watches a former girlfriend who's slit her wrists to get his attention bleed over the course of several hours (she lives, but only because they give her the car keys so she can drive herself to the hospital). In another scene when Arthur is at the hospital, he walks past a young boy with an artificial leg without even a sympathetic glance.
• The Boglodite, Boris the Animal (and presumably all his other world stripping brethren), in Men in Black 3 is definitely this. When he goes back in time to correct the mistakes by aiding his younger self in killing Agent K and preventing the energy shield that would protect the Earth in the present day leading to his entire races' extinction, the first thing he does upon meeting his 1960s self is loudly proclaim him a "pathetic waste of Boglodite flesh" and voices killing him right then and there if he didn't value his own life. In turn, the younger Boris accuses the present one of weakness for being defeated by a human, despite planning to do the exact thing that led to his defeat in the first place if not for the older one's intervention.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Alan Jonah. This is a man who, in his very first scene attacking and massacring a Monarch outpost, looks over one scientist who's pleading for surrender and then looks him dead in the eye before shooting him point-blank. To say nothing of how his plan involves engineering the deaths of millions to billions of people around the world at any cost. He gets some extra points in the novelization for almost-casually threatening his supposed Reluctant Mad Scientist's daughter more than once when he himself was once a father whose child was tragically murdered in his Backstory.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Walter Simmons, very much. He claims he built Mechagodzilla in the name of Muggle Power, but his actions betray his true colors. He's responsible for knowingly continuing to instigate Godzilla's rampages and deliberately making sure Godzilla attacks densely-populated areas, putting thousands to millions of innocent people in Godzilla's warpath, and when Madison actually calls him out on how his motives don't actually amount to helping ANYONE besides himself, he isn't fazed in the slightest. Also, if he was made aware before his death that he'd outlived his daughter Maia, he doesn't show any signs of being fazed by that either.
• Lou from Nightcrawler does not care one iota about anybody else other than himself, nor does he care what he has to do in order to get the best news footage possible. Naturally, considering that he's a sociopath.
• Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. All he cares about is mutilating and murdering people, whether in real life or in their dreams.
• Rollo and the Spirit of the Woods: The erratic rolleys like to portray themselves as scary meanies, and they're not good at taking others into account, taking the village of elves as their new home and refusing afterwards to coexist peacefully with them. However, Lackey, the glib adviser of the tribe's old chieftain, takes the cake. He's right from the start the most vocal about showing hostility to the elves, and even the other rolleys' feelings don't concern him unless he can somehow exploit them. He convinces the new chieftain Rolli to wage war on the elves, and when Rolli tries to launch the attack by shooting a burning arrow into the sea, Lackey doesn't think this is mean enough and intentionally causes the arrow to set the elves' tents ablaze. When Millie's death causes the sun to be covered by the moon, Lackey marvels at this while everyone else is unsettled and dismayed. He plays this even further in the deleted scene in which he gleefully looks forward to making things worse as his tribe's new chieftain even though everyone else is still unsettled by the permanent darkness, and he mocks Rolli for mourning Millie's death.
• Shaun of the Dead: After Shaun reluctantly shoots his zombified mother, all his friends console him, while David just says this:
  David: Well, I think we all agreed you did the right thing there.
• SHAZAM! (2019):
  • Sivana doesn't bat an eye when his head researcher gets disintegrated in front of him, only caring that he finally found what he had been searching for his entire life. He would follow up on this with a massacre of his father's board members, none of whom had done anything wrong to him.
  • The Breyer Brothers not only have zero qualms against physically assaulting a disabled kid, but they are perfectly willing to mock said disabled kid for not having a mom.
• In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Holmes diagnoses Professor Moriarty with "acute narcissism, a complete lack of empathy, and a pronounced inclination toward moral insanity." As usual, he's spot-on.
• Jame (sic) Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs. A good example of this is the "It rubs the lotion on its skin" scene; when his victim realizes there are human fingernails embedded in the walls of her cell from failed escape attempts, she starts screaming. He just starts screaming along in sort of a grotesque parody.
• Dr. Rutledge in Source Code treats Colter less like a human and more like a machine. His attitude comes off like someone who doesn't believe Colter is even capable of normal human emotion, even though that flies in the face of his own conversations with the man.
• Spider-Man 3 has Peter unintentionally do this to Mary Jane as a result of his Acquired Situational Narcissism. When she rants to him about her life falling apart, getting bad reviews for her Broadway performance, he claims he knows what she means with a big smile on his face, saying it's just like Spider-Man trying to deal with the pressures of fame. This, naturally, makes Mary Jane feel worse by seemingly trivializing her issues.
• Star Wars:
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi is a heroic example, so much so, that he found Qui-Gon's sidequests to help others than those they were assigned to help, annoying. It also largely contributed to his uneasy Master-Apprentice relationship with Anakin, who was very emotional and rather unstable.
  • Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious on the other hand is the villainous incarnate of this trope, with everything that comes with it.
• Strays (2023): Doug doesn't show any remorse for the stuff he put Reggie through. Additionally, he mentions that he didn't care about what happened to the dog in Marley & Me; he simply found that moment "boring".
• The Sword of Doom: Ryunosuke rarely concerns himself with the effects his actions have on others. This results in an ever-growing list of people who want him dead.
• Discussed in The Thin Red Line: due to experiencing "combat numbness", people fail to feel anything for the suffering of their fellow men.
• Tragedy Girls: The titular Tragedy Girls. Both have none aside from for each other, along with their parents, and will stop at nothing to get what they want. To them, murder is a mere stepping stone to fame.
• Ultraman Belial from Ultra Galaxy Legends and its sequel. It should come as no surprise since he is (canonically) the first ever, inherently, evil Ultra in the Universe. Not only did he start off by endangering the lives of his home planet (and himself) by being a brash power-hungry young warrior, after he got exhiled, he came back enfused by the power of Alien Reiblood and winding a weapon that has him control an army of monsters to ravage the planet that exiled him, under the belief that they betrayed him and left him to die.
• The Whale: Ellie does not care about Charlie's problems whatsoever; even after Charlie tells her about what happened to his partner, Alan, she still treats him badly.
• The Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan is an unrepentant narcissist who only cares about himself. The suicide of a fellow Stratton Oakmont employee is casually brushed aside, and when Aunt Emma dies of old age, he blithely ignores Naomi's crying at the death of her aunt to take them to Switzerland so he can settle his money instead.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In X-Men: First Class, while Sebastian Shaw professes to act on behalf of other mutants, he has little (if any) regard for his "colleagues" in the Hellfire Club whom he views as expendable assets for his plot to trigger a nuclear holocaust and seize power over what remains for himself. Likewise, he shows no regret whatsoever for his crimes against other mutants such as Erik (aka Magneto) and Darwin.
  • Bolivar Trask's main character flaw in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Suffice to say, when someone with such high goals isn't the least bit stirred with Body Horror and other suffering, there's a bit of a problem...