Unintentionally Unsympathetic / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

Unintentionally Unsympathetic in Films.

---

The following have their own pages:

• Marvel Cinematic Universe

Other examples:

A

• Absolute Power (1997): Walter Sullivan insists that Christy was not a Gold Digger and that he genuinely loved her, and her murder by President Richmond's staff is what drives the plot. However, consider her track record. She marries an octogenarian billionaire like Sullivan, then convinces him they should have an open marriage when he could not perform his marital duties so she could have sex with other men (even though this upsets him), making the idea that she married for love ring hollow. Then she seduces an even more powerful man that she knows Sullivan would absolutely not approve of, and only gets into a fight with him because Richmond starts Slut-Shaming her. While she obviously did not deserve to be murdered, her actions paint her as a much more manipulative and self-centred individual than the narrative insists she is.
• Sean from the 1996 Alaska being upset over his mom's death gives him a reason to feel sorry for him. But the way he takes his anger out on everyone and his overall, unpleasant and nasty personality ends up making him more of a whiny Jerkass instead. He even goes as far as to wish his own dad had died instead of his mom, which immediately turns The Nostalgia Critic against him for good during the review:
  Critic: Aaaaand I hope you choke on your testicles, you little prickhorse. Yeah, I hate him, and there’s no way you can make me like him! I don’t care if he cures cancer, I’m still not gonna enjoy this character! That was so mean-spirited and so out of nowhere that I hope he just spontaneously combusts when he goes into that room!
• The mother Isabelle from the Lifetime Movie of the Week Amy & Isabelle. Her distance from her daughter and judgmental attitude is justified by having an affair with an older man in her teen years and getting pregnant as a result. However when Amy has an affair with her teacher, Isabelle attacks her in a fit of rage and cuts off all her daughter's hair. Following Amy getting abused by another authority figure, many found Isabelle's abuse to be just as awful as the teacher's and it was impossible to sympathise with her afterwards.
• A Sound of Thunder makes the entire human race this, and implies that the future is full of bloodthirsty psychopaths. After the last wild animals had been hunted to extinction, poachers and trophy hunters decided to kill captive animals in zoos and wildlife parks for trophies and for fun. And what do they do when functioning time travel is invented? Do they use it for peaceful means or to correct tragedies? No! They use it to send people back in time to slaughter even MORE animals. By the end of the time waves, a lot of viewers considered the human race being wiped out and replaced as karma.
• In Avatar:
  • Many viewers saw the Na'vi as arrogant, xenophobic hypocrites who weren't all that different from the human antagonists. For example, they hold themselves above humans because they always mate for life, but when Neytiri finds out Jake's true mission, she leaves him to die despite having mated with him.
  • Furthermore, while we don't know who fired the first shot originally, the first time the audience sees Neytiri she's shown planning to shoot Jake with an arrow coated with a neurotoxin, simply for the crime of walking in their territory. In addition, the RDA machinery is covered in those same arrows, meaning that the Na'vi are just as guilty of attacking the humans and are actively doing so throughout the film.
  • There is supposedly a Deleted Scene that would've revealed that the impetus for the current conflict, the destruction of Grace Augustine's school and the accidental death of Neytiri's unmentioned-in-the-film-proper sister therein, involved both species acting badly to various degrees, getting across some moral ambiguity not present in the final cut.
  • Jake himself, the movie's main hero, spends months dicking around with the Na'vi and enjoying having legs again while feeding intel to the ruthless officer Quaritch, instead of warning them about their imminent destruction. Supposedly they won't listen to him until he passes his manhood ritual, but when he finally does pass, does he tell them about the invasion that will be arriving to wipe out their home tomorrow? Nope, he goes and bones the Chief's daughter instead. How It Should Have Ended calls this out, claiming that the ending of the film could have been avoided if he just did his job in the first place and negotiated with them like he was supposed to.
• Avatar: The Way of Water:
  • Many fans have noted that by taking refuge with the Metkayina Clan, Jake is also putting them in the crosshairs in his war against the RDA as well, especially when he knows that there's a very dangerous personal enemy who would stop at nothing to kill him and everyone he loves. As much as Ronal is being a jerk toward her guests, she has a very good point when she says that Jake and his family's presence in her clan would bring the Sky People's wrath onto them, which is exactly what ends up happening in the third act.
  • A portion of viewers, particularly parents generally found Jake and Neytiri’s parenting skills inattentive at best and utterly reprehensible at worst. While it’s at least somewhat understandable at the beginning that they can’t always be there for their children while dealing with the pressure of guerrilla fighting RDA, even if their lack of attention leads to Neteyam, Lo'ak, Tuk, Kiri and Spider getting captured by Quaritch. It’s after they leave the rainforest and go the Metkayina Clan that Jake and Neytiri have far less of an excuse for not looking after their kids to the best of their abilities as Neteyam, Lo'ak, Kiri and Tuk get captured again by Quaritch multiple times with the only reason for them not being killed on spot being Quaritch‘s Noble Demon tendencies as he only wants Jake. While the film treats it as bad luck on the part of the kids with a good dose of Rule of Drama, a good amount of viewers still felt Jake and Neytiri were woefully neglectful of their children and could have avoided a lot of heartache such as Neteyam getting killed if they were just more attentive to their kids’ whereabouts particularly given how often they willingly let the teenagers wander off to explore, taking the youngest Tuk with them.

B

• In The Birth of a Nation, Austin Stoneman's horrified reaction to Silas wanting to marry his daughter is intended to be an Even Evil Has Standards moment, but to modern audiences it actually makes him seem worse by revealing him to be a gigantic hypocrite.
• Janine from The Brothers Solomon enters an agreement with the titular brothers to be artificially inseminated by one of them and carry the child to term, then give up the child to be raised by them in exchange for monetary compensation. The big conflict in the movie comes about when the brothers, well-meaning but oblivious and bad with people, say Innocently Insensitive things about her giving up the child forever (which she is starting to have second thoughts about) and she runs away from the commitment she made with them. While sympathetic to some degree because of the misunderstanding, (and even then not a lot because giving up the child was what she signed up for from the very start) it still doesn’t necessarily excuse the fact that she decided to change her mind late into the pregnancy, kept their money so she could use it to raise the child, and proceeded to ditch the two of them after unilaterally deciding that the man she thinks to be the baby’s biological father at the time can’t play any role in the child’s life. Admittedly Janine acknowledges that what she is doing is wrong and asks them to forgive her, but the brothers never put any of the blame on Janine at any point and proceed to blame themselves for what happened, and in the end Janine is completely absolved of any responsibility.
• In Beauty and the Beast (2017), the movie gave the villagers both an Adaptational Jerkass and an Adaptational Nice Guy treatment compared to the original movie. They were the former since they treated Belle with more spite due to teaching another girl to read and destroying her washing machine while in the original, they simply found her bizarre for wanting more than this provincial life, and they were the latter due to being more suspicious of Gaston to the point of being bribed to sing during "Gaston". Compare this to the original where they took everything he said and did at face value and loved him for being the town's badass hunter. They are also more sympathetic towards Maurice that they confront Gaston when they thought he tried to kill him where, in the original, they treated him like a senile old man and has no opposition to him being incarcerated, even if that was Gaston's evil plan to get Belle to return to the village. As a result, this makes the ending of the remake where it's revealed that they were former inhabitants of the castle and reunited with their families seen as unearned because they didn't grow to appreciate Belle more and didn't apologize for almost killing their sovereign and their families they left behind to be part of the curse.
• Black Christmas (2019): The sorority sisters, except for Riley, don't come off well, being annoying, self-righteous and sometimes downright nasty. Some specific examples:
  • Kris's efforts to push Riley into facing her accuser during the Christmas contest can go both ways. While she urges Riley to break out of her shell, it can also be seen as a self-serving or reckless act to push a trauma victim past her threshold. She also then compounds it by posting the video online without Riley's consent and then acts like it's Riley's fault and that she just wants to be a victim when she's upset about it gaining traction.
  • Given the reveal that the Hawthorn cult is capable of mind-control, the question of how responsible the frat brothers were for their murderous actions is never made clear. Even after they see that the mind control has been lifted from Landon, they simply lock all of the remainder in their frat hall to burn to death.

C

• A lot of Christian films suffer from this, with the main characters often being just as bad as the obsessive atheists being set up as the main antagonists of the films by being just as stubborn and demanding towards wanting people to believe what they believe, only on the other end of the scale. The films lack any semblance of logic on either side of the debate, and have poor characterizations all around due to obvious straw characters, singularly-dimensional extremists, and universal refusal of everyone to accept any other person's beliefs.
  • In Rock: It's Your Decision, the main character is meant to come off as a good Christian trying to steer clear from the "sins" of rock and roll and save others from it after realizing what it "actually" is, but instead he comes off as a closed-minded and bigoted jerkass to anyone who doesn't share the same values and interpretations of Christianity as the protagonist (and then solely in some cases, as many Christians have no difficulty reconciling their faith and an enjoyment of secular entertainment).
    • At the beginning of the movie, he came off as a normal guy until he found out about all the dangers of rock music, and then he became a walking stereotype.
    • He even turns against his own mother, who brought the youth pastor in to get him to quit rock music in the first place, when he decides that the soap operas she always watches are evil (or as he puts it, "sex with commercials") too. This is actually WORSE than how he was before; when he still liked rock music, he felt guilty about snarking at her and apologized to her for it without being forced to.
    • His sermon in the penultimate scene of the film sees him condemn all rock music as 'evil' through various unsupported claims of such music promoting degenerate lifestyles and devil worship, which isn't helped by the fact that none of the songs he mentions are like how he says they are; he also goes out of his way to decry homosexuality for no particular reason through the course of this bigotry-laden rant.
  • God's Not Dead achieves this through its protagonist, Josh. He's a religious college student challenged to debate the existence of God by his Jerkass professor. Despite being painted as a righteous Christian fighting a smug Hollywood Atheist, Josh's actions range from questionable to obnoxious.
    • His cavalier attitude towards breaking up with his longtime girlfriend, Kara. Admittedly, she's painted as clingy and unsupportive, telling Josh it's a bad idea to debate Professor Radisson. Nonetheless, her concerns are justified, as Radisson outright tells Josh that he'll ruin his academic career if he goes forward with the debate.^note Of course, while Radisson has the intention of doing so, whether he has the ability is another matter. We also learn that Kara turned down two other colleges to stay with Josh, and even resisted her mother's disapproval to date him. Josh is unmoved by all of this, dismissing her without a second thought and (it's implied) hooking up with another girl later in the film.
    • For that matter, not only Kara but several characters note that Josh could easily drop the class and take a similar course with a less obnoxious professor. Josh's counterargument is that doing so would "mess up [his] schedule." Naturally, he's portrayed as a principled martyr rather than a kid too lazy to move some classes around. In a similar vein, the whole thing would have been resolved immediately if anybody had told the administration what was going on, considering that Radisson bullying a student for not sharing their religious views was blatantly unprofessional and could have got him into serious trouble with the College.
    • YMMV how effective Josh's actual arguments are, but he's just as apt as Professor Radisson to use cheap shots and insults when arguing his points. The worst comes when Radisson confides in Josh that a personal tragedy drove him away from religion. Josh uses this in their final debate, browbeating Radisson with an Armor-Piercing Question of why he hates God, driving Radisson into an anguished Motive Rant in front of the whole class. The movie treats this as a brilliant move on Josh's part, rather than a low blow exploiting Radisson's past to discredit his argument.
  • A Matter of Faith:
    • The Bible-believing creationist father, Stephen, is presented as the usual Christian Hero fighting against the evils of "The Myth of Evolution" by protesting its teaching in his daughter's college. However, he goes behind his daughter's back to question her biology teacher, something she is incredibly embarrassed by, tries to force his belief into a class that has nothing to do with it, and practically guilt trips his own daughter into fully accepting his beliefs again based on feelings rather than facts.
    • The film attempts to portray the actions of the creationist characters as exposing the pro-evolution biology teacher of having an agenda of corrupting students away from God; however, through the film, it's clear that he's just doing his job of teaching the theory of evolution as accepted by the scientific community, and it comes off instead as them trying to force their beliefs into the public education system because someone has the gall to believe differently from them.
  • In God's Not Dead 2, the main protagonist mentions Jesus by name when answering a student's history-related question and another student reports her, setting up the main plot of the film. Not only does the fact that the circumstances in which she came to be in court afterwards have no basis in reality, as she was answering a question rather than preaching her beliefs, she later won't back down from wanting to be able to preach her beliefs in a public school classroom, despite this not only being both illegal and unethical, but actually has grounds for dismissal of a teacher.
  • In Old Fashioned, the protagonist supposed to be a devout Christian man with strong and admirable values regarding dating, however during the movie he becomes increasingly unlikable:
    • He refuses to go inside his tenant's apartment to fix her appliances while she is still there, giving the reason that "he will not be alone with a woman who's not his wife". Instead, he makes her wait outside, sometimes in middle of the night.
    • Several other times his supposedly sweet and principled actions come across as creepy and unsettling, like when his tenant makes it clear that she's interested in him, and the first thing he does is taking her to a pastor to discuss marriage.
    • He also makes a scene at a bachelor party thrown for one of his friends by chasing away the stripper, which makes the stripper and her manager reasonably pissed off at him. Never mind that it wasn't his party and he had no right to decide what goes on in it. While he was entitled to his opinion, simply leaving instead of forcing everyone to conform with his ideas would've made him come off as far less of a prick.
• Amy from Cuties is supposed to be seen as a tragic character caught between the lifestyle enforced at home, and the lifestyle she discovers while not at home. However, Amy's incredibly selfish and very nearly criminal actions in the film make it hard to find her at all likeable. This includes her acting out at school, getting into a fight with a rival dance group, stabbing a boy with a compass for being smacked in the butt by him, and causing a rift with her own dance crew for posting a picture of her genitalia (which she did out of panic when her cousin demands to give back the cellphone she stole from him early in the film). The tipping point comes when Amy pushes Yasmine into the river, nearly drowning her because Amy discovered that Yasmine cannot swim and was only able to save herself thanks to a buoy nearby. Needless to say, these actions made it difficult for audiences to sympathize with her from that point on, especially when at the end of the film, Amy ends up mostly getting away without too much trouble.
• Diane from the Lifetime Movie of the Week, Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life. We're meant to side with her for being concerned for her teenage son Justin's porn addiction. Problem is, Justin's "porn" doesn't even come off as explicit to begin with, yet Diane allows her 10-year old son to play Grand Theft Auto. She also acts disappointed with Justin just for winning third place in a swimming competition instead of first. Not to mention that she shows absolutely no sympathy for Justin when he gets severely bullied and becomes suicidal. All of this makes Diane come off as an Abusive Parent who is uncaring towards Justin and his problems seem to have come from her rather than his "problem".

D

• Dark Phoenix;
  • Mystique is seen as this by many viewers when she calls out Xavier, even though it's meant to be an empowering scene. She mocks Xavier by saying that she can’t remember a moment where Xavier actually "risked something" like the rest of the X-Men did, despite the fact that Xavier had sacrificed just as much as they had (including the use of his legs, something she was there for) in the previous movies. She also chastises Xavier for sending them on dangerous missions (despite willingly doing so before as an X-Men member) and lectures him for trying to make heroes out of the X-Men, claiming they're "just kids". This sentiment comes off as contradictory to the rousing speech she made in Apocalypse (where she declared they're "not students anymore", but official X-Men). Also, her observation that they're "just kids" is downright nonsensical due to the team now being in their mid-to-late 20s and have been doing such work for nearly a decade, making Mystique come off as both overprotective and hypocritical. She also claims that the female team members are "always saving the men" and that Charles should change the team name to "X-Women" to suit their alleged work and effort. As (male and female) fans pointed out, the male team members (primarily Quicksilver and Nightcrawler) have saved the team, Mystique included, from death at least a few times in the movies; including this film. Hence, they find this statement untrue and, once again, hypocritical.
  • After Mystique's death, Hank decided to team up with Erik to hunt Jean down, even agreeing to Erik's decision to outright kill her out of vengeance for accidentally killing Mystique. While Hank has a right to be furious that Jean killed Mystique, he knows that she did not do it on purpose, and is simply scared and confused as she doesn't know what's happening to her. Despite knowing this, he allows his emotions to cloud his judgment and decides to team up with his worst enemy to kill his former student without hesitation. The fact he blames everything on Charles and makes him out to be a cruel villain who selfishly "messed with the mind of an eight-year-old girl" and declares that they should have "been protecting the students from Charles all along" (despite what he himself is doing in trying to outright murder Jean) really doesn't help his case either.
• DC Extended Universe
  • Jonathan Kent in Man of Steel believes that Clark should hide his powers because revealing himself would answer the question of if mankind is alone in the universe and would have global ramifications forever. However, some fans felt that him answering "Maybe" when asked if Clark was supposed to let a busload of children drown, even if he is visibly upset when answering, without explaining why at the moment (he does so later) comes off too much as him implying that letting them drown would have been the better choice. He then refuses rescue and forces Clark to watch as he's killed by a tornado. While he made this choice to protect the world, some fans argue that Clark could have easily saved him without exposing himself if given the chance instead of being left traumatized and fatherless. The idea seems to be partially ripped from Superman: Birthright, where Pa Kent is similarly (though nowhere near as destructively) apprehensive about his son's heritage — the difference being, that version ultimately admits he's acting stupid and lashing out at something he can't control, and he apologizes for it. His ghost or Clark's mental profile of him does say that he's proud of the man Clark's become in the sequel, but still admits no wrongdoing.
  • In Dawn of Justice both Lex Luthor and Batman's desires to kill Superman are obviously misguided, but the supposed difference that makes Batman sympathetic is that he genuinely cares for the humans Superman might hurt while Luthor just hates anyone more powerful than him, and Batman throws away his kryptonite weapon in disgust when he realizes that Superman was a completely innocent person who may be an alien by birth but was ultimately a human at heart. However, Bruce's motivations can ring hollow though, given this version of Batman kills criminals left and right, not because he has to, as he hasn't been killing his whole career, but because Robin's death has made him vengeful (moreso). And the movie never directly acknowledges this hypocrisy. He even keeps killing after stopping from killing Superman, and only spares Luthor for unexplained reasons. And the supposed straw that broke the camel's back and made his contingency to kill Superman a set plan? One of his employees supposedly blowing himself and thousands of people in the Capitol Building up just to spite Superman. And Batman apparently sympathizes with this man, and the audience is supposed to believe he cares humanity, and not just those he knows personally.
  • Wonder Woman 1984: While neither Diana or Steve are responsible for Steve's possessing the body of a random man, neither of them seem to care about this at all. Even though they learn what happened almost immediately, Diana shows no concern for this man's life and spends most of the film suggesting that they make the possession permanent, essentially advocating the outright murder of a random innocent. And that's not even getting into the two having sex using that man's body without his consent and constantly bringing said body into mortal danger. Considering Diana is forced to let Steve pass on at his own insistence despite the chaos, instead of coming to the conclusion herself, she often comes across as entitled and selfish rather than just heartbroken.
• Death Proof: Three women leave their jet-lagged and sleeping friend behind as "collateral" with a gruff, shotgun-toting redneck on an isolated property so they can go off on their own and recreate driving stunts in a car that he's selling. This is after one of them lies and tells the redneck their friend is a porn star. Word of God is that he raped the friend after they leave. And these three women are the heroines of this particular story. The one thing that can be said about them is that they kick the ass of someone even more vile. Within this group, Abernathy is the one that tells the redneck their friend is a porn actress — happily telling the others she's going to make him think "Lee's gonna blow him".
• In The Descendants:
  • The movie tries to portray both Matt and Elizabeth as equally messed up people, with many characters implying their marriage had been failing for a while. However as the couple never had scenes together, Elizabeth comes off across as more unsympathetic, given she had an affair with a married man, was the one to initiate it and intended to get a divorce from Matt. To be fair, since Elizabeth was in a coma the whole movie, it's left uncertain if she did ever have any regrets for what she did to Matt.
  • One of Elizabeth's friends knew about the affair and tries to defend her when Matt finds out. Yes, she was thinking about her friend but the friend also knew Elizabeth was potentially destroying two families and seemingly never advised against it. Thus, it was oddly cathartic when Matt fires the Wham Line that Elizabeth was never going to wake up.
• The Devil Wears Prada:
  • Andy's friends are supposed to be in the right about Andy spending too much time at her job, but are rather nasty to her despite her giving them designer gifts because of said job. Many people think their attitude of throwing Andy's phone around while her boss is calling was way out of line. Lily also instantly blames Andy for Christian kissing her, not allowing Andy a chance to explain the situation.
  • Nate especially gets this, complaining about Andy working so late (despite it being the responsible thing for her to do) and whining about her missing his birthday because she had to help cover for a sick coworker, something she had no control over.
• Ethan from Due Date is supposed to be seen as a sympathetic Manchild who lost his father recently and is desperately trying to mourn his loss. However, he also causes nothing but horrible troubles for Peter, who is desperately trying to get home to his expecting wife. Not to mention that it's later revealed that he stole Peter's wallet in order to force the latter to come with him on the trip.
• The protagonists of Don't Breathe. No matter what Freudian Excuses they give them and no matter how repulsively villainous they make the blind antagonist, it's just nearly impossible to sympathize with a trio who kick the movie off with such a Kick the Dog move as to decide to break into the home of a blind war veteran to steal the cash settlement he received when his daughter was killed in a car accident. Especially Rocky, who repeatedly refuses to call the cops simply because she doesn't want to lose the cash she's stolen which gets Alex killed and allows the Blind Man to survive the events of the film.
• Koba of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was meant by the film makers to be seen as a Tragic Villain whose fear of reliving his lifetime of abuse at the hands of humans, anger and need for revenge on those who've wronged him, and growing frustration with his leader Caesar, pushes him over the edge. This was lost on many due to Koba's selfishness, ruthless and sadistic savagery, and blatant hypocrisy towards the end of the movie as he gleefully uses human tactics and weapons to achieve his goals, and treating his fellow apes just as badly as the humans he hates.

E-F

• David and Mia, the main characters of Evil Dead (2013), are given an elaborate and tragic backstory (which is relayed all at once through dialogue even though they obviously both know the details) clearly meant to make them sympathetic, but the rest of the movie never really succeeds at showing either of them, or any of their friends for that matter, in a particularly positive light. Even though these people are all supposedly friends, they treat each other distantly at best or hostilely at worst; for example Mia is shown to be totally incapable of overcoming her heroin addiction despite constantly assuring everyone else that she can, and they criticize her for it even though their over-the-top method of "helping" her is incredibly unhealthy and harmful, making it impossible to even figure out who's really to blame out of these assholes.
• Some audience members came to view Cole from F the Prom as this by the end. He decides to ruin prom for the whole school to get back at the popular kids for bullying him... by resorting to many of the tactics they themselves use to torment him and his friends. As a result, some viewers felt he no longer had the moral high ground when he calls out the popular kids for bullying them and that he is just as petty and vindictive as they are; his comment about how "at least none of us shot up the school or committed suicide" can also come off as very insensitive. He also publicly blames Maddy for him being bullied, and while Maddy is certainly a jerk for abandoning him to hang out with the popular crowd, Cole never gives a similar "Reason You Suck" Speech to Kane or the people who actually bullied him (while it's true Maddy didn't try to stop or speak out against the bullying, she never actively took part), nor does he call out the teachers who ignored or enabled the bullying.
• The Family Stone: Meredith is supposed to be Innocently Insensitive during the dinner scene, but instead she just comes off as homophobic and callous towards Thad. When they give her the chance to let the comments slide, she goes even further by implicitly saying that their gay son "isn't normal". Sybil in particular is portrayed as being in the wrong for angrily defending her son, and Meredith breaks up with her boyfriend because he wouldn't defend her bigoted opinions.
• A Futile and Stupid Gesture: The biopic about legendary National Lampoon founder and screenwriter Doug Kenney displays plenty of awareness that Doug was a difficult person, but it also wants the audience to invest in him as a person and feel sympathy for him. He's shown to have had many friends, but beyond the fact that he was funny and fun to party with, it never establishes why so many people liked him. Instead, the film portrays a successful, Harvard-educated man who is given to bouts of depression, is unfaithful to his wife and girlfriends, has serious substance abuse issues, a major chip on his shoulder and alienates nearly everyone who cares about him. Watching him spiral into cocaine addiction and die in a possible suicide is a bummer, but it's hard to actually sympathize with him.

G

• In The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, the Kids are obviously intended to be depicted as the innocent, sympathetic victims of prejudice in a story about how people should be judged for their personalities rather than their appearances. Fair enough, except they have almost no personality outside of being incredibly disgusting. Between extremely gross and/or uninteresting pointless shenanigans and frequently breaking the law, they come off more as Humanoid Abominations than The Grotesque.
• Glitter: To many viewers, Dice comes off less like a turbulent but fundamentally decent guy, and more like a controlling, emotionally manipulative, and borderline abusive creep.
• In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
  • While the character of Emma Russell is not meant to be fully sympathetic, much of their motive to fix the world is due to their tragic backstory, including a loss of a child during the first Godzilla attack. However they decide to work with an eco-terrorist organization to unleash monsters en-masse and bring human death on a global scale. The film never acknowledges the hypocrisy of their actions that they decided to condemn millions of other parents' children for "the greater good", to say nothing that they were willing to betray and allow her ex-husband Mark and all her ex-colleagues die as well, instead focusing on their one redeeming quality of protectiveness over their remaining loved one.
  • Some viewers reacted this way to Mark Russell's grudge against Godzilla, pointing out that it comes off as dickish that he responds to his son's death in the MUTOs' havoc by blaming the very Kaiju who killed the MUTOs and in doing so prevented them bringing even more destruction. However, this interpretation assumes that it was the MUTOs who caused Andrew's death and not Godzilla (who did cause some of the collateral damage on his own, with Mark outright stating Godzilla killed his son).
• Gordy: Henry Royce certainly comes across as this; While he may be a Cool Old Guy, he is shockingly unfazed by his daughter's public humiliation when the test shoots don't turn out as hoped, announcing Gordy's victory even as she's crying her eyes out right in front of him. However, perhaps the most egregious comes after he suddenly dies of a heart attack, leaving his entire company not to his own daughter or any living relative, but to Gordy, who is named as his successor. Villainous as he may be, Mr. Sipes' disbelief at this is perfectly reasonable.
• In Grudge Match, Kim Basinger's character Sally comes across as this. Decades ago, when she was Razor's girlfriend, she once saw what she assumed was him cheating on her. Rather than confront him about that or end the relationship, she decided to take revenge on him by sleeping with his rival, The Kid. This turned the rivalry between the two into full-blown hatred. When it turned out, The Kid got her pregnant, she rejected his proposal to marry him and forbade him to see his son, BJ. She also hid the truth about BJ's parentage from him until he was in his 30s. While The Kid is hardly an angel and Razor was constantly putting his career before his relationship with Sally, their flaws are recognized as such and The Kid does make efforts to make amends to his son. Sally not letting The Kid to raise his son (not that he tried all that hard) or lying to BJ his entire life is portrayed as no big deal, and she never seems to be sorry for either. She is remorseful about the way her relationship with Razor ended but merely in a 'Sorry I overreacted and did a stupid thing' sort of way. Despite treating the men in her life terribly, the movie views her as a perfectly good Love Interest for Razor and them getting back together is supposed to be a good thing.

H

• Hannah Montana: The Movie has both Hannah/Miley and her boyfriend, Travis. Miley, for not really trying to stay away from her Hannah persona (that was the whole purpose of her family heading out to Tennessee in the first place), and Travis for being too stupid to recognize her up-close. It took Miley accidentally removing her wig in front of him for him to put two and two together.
  • The townspeople, too. They have money problems, and what do they do? They reject the construction of a mall, something that could help them get out of their debt by increasing tourism. Not to mention, it was going to be built in a large, empty field they weren't using, anyway. Then, the townspeople state that, after she reveals herself on stage to them by pulling her wig off and pouring her heart out to them, they want Miley to put her wig back on and keep being Hannah, despite part of the movie's plot revolving around Miley questioning whether continuing to be Hannah is still a good idea and finally pulling the trigger to unmask in front of a large crowd. They come off more as selfish assholes rather than encouraging enthusiasts for wanting Miley to keep suffering the constant struggle she's been having ever since they started the Hannah identity.
• Home Sweet Home Alone was much criticized for going wrong in two ways, as the would-be antagonists were Unintentionally Sympathetic Anti Villains while other characters fell into this trope:
  • Archie Yates portrays Max as a very snobby child who doesn't come off as being bullied or neglected by his family. The pain he inflicts on the home invaders actually feels less deserved (thanks to what we know about them, but he doesn't), and he seems almost too Easily Forgiven, considering the "Home Alone" Antics he subjected the McKenzies to could have easily landed them in the hospital if not left with permanent injuries. There's even a scene where, at a church toy drive, Max is even given a toy gun from someone less fortunate than him. He's only really at his best in the penultimate scene, where he tells Jeff and Pam's children not to take their family for granted and then saves the valuable doll, rather than having more time to showcase his Hidden Heart of Gold the way Kevin did.
  • Max's family as well, especially his father. While his mother does attempt to get back to her son, the rest of the family doesn't seem the least bit phased. Even in the first two movies, the rest of the family is visibly shaken by Kevin's absence. In the ending, in which it's shown that the two families are now friends, Max's father isn't even there!
  • The issue of calling the police to perform a welfare check on on the kid home alone actually is brought up — except Buzz writes it off as a prank phone call because it's a running gag that his brother, original protagonist Kevin, calls him and pretends to have been left behind on Christmas. Except this time, it's not Kevin calling about it — it's someone completely different. So why would anyone assume that this is just another "wolf" cry? This makes Buzz seem like he hasn't grown out of his Jerkass behavior and is quite an incompetent officer.

I

• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Most of the Angel Falls townsfolk except Winnie, Gale (her aunt), Cara, and Bernie. Winnie's parents clearly favor her brother, who despite being otherwise portrayed as a sympathetic character also pushes Winnie into celebrating Christmas. Her boyfriend Robbie and friend Darla are cheating behind her back and both blame her. Everyone defends themselves by pointing out that Winnie is bad company and depressed, which would be fair enough (if already unpleasant). But they all ignore the fact that Winnie lost her best friend Cara and killed Henry, paying no mind to what a deeply traumatic experience both events would be, and that Winnie would naturally be triggered by the anniversary and Christmas. Worse, her parents did this instead of being understanding or get Winnie psychiatric help for it, which she clearly needs, as she's grown severely depressed enough to wish she'd never been born.

J

• Jurassic Park:
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: John Hammond is supposed to come across as a benevolent old man who just has the dinosaurs' best interests at heart, but it's pointed out within the film that he's knowingly bankrupting a global conglomerate which no doubt employs thousands of people to do so, for a problem Hammond himself created in the first place because of his pride. Also, given the implications that he's in poor health, his sudden conversion to environmentalism seems more like a rather selfish deathbed confession than a real act of altruism. And all this is before he essentially blackmails Ian Malcolm into going to the island by sending his girlfriend there first; a move that was supposed to be morally ambiguous, but Hammond never gets proper comeuppance for. Dr. Malcolm tells him "If you want to leave your name on something, fine. But stop putting it on other people's headstones."
  • Jurassic Park III: Once it's revealed that the Kirbys are trying to retrieve their missing son from Isla Sorna, we're supposed to sympathize with them due to being parents, right? But let's not forget that they posed as a wealthy thrill-seeking couple to dupe Dr. Alan Grant and his assistant professor into coming along as unofficial tour guides. And the check wrote him is later implied to be no good. And while they were upfront with the mercenaries they hired, their actions still get all three men killed.
  • Jurassic World:
    • Claire was this for a good number of viewers. Like Hammond she’s supposed to be seen as misguided rather than a truly bad person but still doesn’t change the fact she not only helps create the highly dangerous Indominus Rex but also refuses to close the park down when the Indominus escapes putting countless lives in jeopardy — simply because it would be bad for business. Not helping this is Claire’s initial indifference to her nephews Zach and Grey whom her sister explicitly asked her to look after, pawning them off to her assistant Zara to babysit. All these actions would usually lead to Laser-Guided Karma for any other Jurassic Park character but Claire ends up being a Karma Houdini. In the sequels unsurprising Claire Took a Level in Kindness into a more likeable character with her characterisation in Jurassic World being pretty much ignored entirely.
    • Owen though pretty damn cool is still not exempt from this either, his Testosterone Poisoning attitude and multiple demeaning remarks to Claire can make him pretty unlikeable (granted his insistence she should really change out of her heels in the jungle is fair). Especially not helping Owens’s case is that if he didn’t pick up the Idiot Ball by deciding to investigate the Indominus Rex’s enclosure before checking whether or not it was inside — the Indominus wouldn’t have escaped and gone on a killing spree.
  • The entire plot of of the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hinges on the debate of whether to let the dinosaurs die on an erupting volcanic island or try to rescue and relocate them. Claire, Owen, and the DPOG are dedicated to the latter and the audience is supposed to sympathize with this, largely ignoring the franchise' previous theme of how the dinosaurs are essentially monsters, and all attempts by humans to contain them are doomed to failure. Granted, Eli Mills did lie about his plan, saying they were taking them to another island when in reality he was taking them to the mainland to sell and experiment on, but can instead make the heroes seem like idiots for trusting Mills instead of checking into his claims of a secure sanctuary, especially since the other possible relocation sites; Isla Sorna and the sanctuary island owned by Kenji Kon (the latter of which hadn't been thought of at the film's release) aren't even mentioned. The penultimate scene reinforces the idea that the heroes care more about saving dinosaurs than protecting humans or other wildlife when Maisie, Lockwood's young granddaughter revealed to actually be a clone of his deceased daughter, releases the dinosaurs to save them from dying from a gas leak, and this is framed as a sympathetic, if not outright moral decision. The sequel Jurassic World Dominion just deciding not to expound upon the consequences and high loss of life in a world now full of man-eating dinosaurs, did little to mull over viewers who disagreed with Maisie’s decision.
  • In general regarding the World trilogy a portion of fans found Blue the velociraptor unlikeable, despite the films’ admirable efforts to try and make the audience care and root for this hyper-dangerous carnivorous predator whom Owen can only just keep under control through their familial bond. These issues were increased in Jurassic World Dominion where Blue is out in the wild beyond Owen’s watch and the film deliberately avoids answering the uncomfortable question of whether she’s attacked and eaten humans or not (she is entirely capable of attacking humans as shown in the previous two films). For this reason some viewers were unmoved by the subplot of Blue’s child Beta getting taken and Owen having to say goodbye to her in the end, especially as the latter means two velociraptors are now out there in the world free to snack on any human.

K-L

• Karen: Imani.
  • Despite the fact that it is made clear being racist to her is wrong, it is heavily implied that she herself is racist towards white people. Despite moving to a majorly white neighborhood she hardly ever tries to integrate herself into the community and only ever hangs out with other black people.
  • It is made clear that she was the one who wanted to move to this house, a house that is repeatedly stated she and her husband can barely afford. Not to mention a very large house despite the fact she has no desire to have children. Then it is revealed her job is a blogger, which means she could literally do her job anywhere there is an internet connection whereas her husband now has to commute to get to work, which causes him unnecessary stress that he uses marijuana to self medicate with.
• The Karate Kid (1984): Freddy and his friends cheering for Daniel and helping the crowd raise him on their shoulders after the tournament was most likely intended to be a redemptive moment for the character after his earlier spurning of Daniel. However, most fans interpret it as yet another example of him being a Fair-Weather Friend, as he's only shown to be acting friendly to Daniel again after he's already won the tournament.
• In The Kid (2000), we are supposed to feel sorry for Russ's father for trying and failing to get Russ to spend time with his family, and view Russ as a callous jerk for constantly blowing him off. But later in the movie, it's revealed that on Russ's eighth birthday, his angsty father took his anger and fear out on his son after his terminally ill wife had to take Russ home from school for fighting some bullies. Not only did Russ's dad blame him for the incident, but he also let Russ know that his mother was dying (she had cancer) and accused him of trying to kill her faster, as Russ helplessly broke down, which only added to his father's rage. Russ's father then physically shakes him while harshly telling him to stop crying, and then rubs his tears away from his eyes so painfully that Russ is left with an involuntary eye twitch well into adulthood, along with severe emotional suppression. Russ now feared that him crying would be enough to incur his father's wrath again. Knowing about this incident (as well as realizing that his dad had to raise Russ alone after his mom died), it's little wonder Russ wants nothing more to do with the man.
• Gavin from The Ledge. He's supposed to be viewed as a courageous and rational person who simply doesn't believe in any religious things. However, the whole conflict of the movie is the Love Triangle that develops between him, the antagonist Joe (a fundamentalist Christian) and Shana (Joe's wife), and it's clear that Gavin and Shana's affair didn't arise as a result of "one thing led to another" but from Gavin deliberately making it so that Shana will cheat on her husband. Given the "point" of the movie is that atheists can be good people without religion, Gavin's enormous selfishness and petty reasons behind wrecking another person's marriage makes it a massive Broken Aesop.

M

• Child killer Hans Beckert of M makes a very passionate case that he cannot help what he is and a mob of criminals has no moral authority to lynch him. He seems to genuinely believe that he's not responsible for his actions and the movie does everything it can to make him sympathetic, but none of that mitigates the bald-faced fact that he's a monstrous serial killer (and implied rapist) of children. Whether anyone has the moral right to take his life or not, there's absolutely no sane case to be made that Beckert should not be permanently removed from society by some kind of means, even if it's only in the interests of stopping him from butchering any more innocent young victims.
• In Mad Max: Fury Road, the Vuvalini ("Many Mothers"). While the audience definitely isn't supposed to approve of their ethos of killing almost anyone outside their small tribe (especially males) that they meet, the heroes align with them and help them win at the end without anyone pointing out that they're clearly just as much of a sociopathic cult as Immortan Joe's faction. The only real differences being that they're misandrists whereas Joe is a Straw Misogynist, and that they have fewer resources (but only because Joe at least lets seemingly anyone join his faction whereas the Mothers kill outsiders on sight, oftentimes after deliberately luring them in with the ruthless Wounded Gazelle Gambit). Even the claim that factions like them are the best one can find in the Wasteland fall flat when one recalls all the surviving peaceful settlements Max had and would continue to encounter in the franchise.
• Mean Girls: Janis. She is just as manipulative as Regina (if not more so), encouraging Cady to make friends with the Plastics (and sabotage them) in the first place, then taunting her by revealing her manipulations in front of the entire school (throwing Cady under the bus in the process), and gets cheered for it. She also deliberately mispronounces Cady's name for no apparent reason other than the fact that she prefers saying it that way. This, combined with her Hollywood Homely appearance, has only fueled some fans' theories that Janis is herself a former Alpha Bitch.
• Pam in Meet the Parents. As soon as the relationship started to get serious, she should've told Greg to forget about marriage because of the unlikelihood of her father ever giving his blessing. She also should've told him that in the unlikely event that Jack did give his blessing, he would spend the rest of his life treating Greg like garbage.

N

• Shelby and the Kappa Nu sisters in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. The sequel takes a more sympathetic stance on them partying and disrupting the Radners' lives than it did with Teddy and his frat brothers in the original. However, the problems with it are 1) they use Straw Feminist arguments to rationalize their actions and never get called out on it, 2) the only things the Radners actually did to them was politely request they keep the partying down until they can officially sell their house in 30 days and call their parents when they refused, and 3) the things they do to the Radners are far more malicious (such as intentionally trying to break up the Radners' marriage and stealing their possessions to sell to pay for house rent). It's somewhat made up for by them buying the Radners' home from them, therefore being the solution to the problem they caused in the first place, however this still means that they got off without any real punishment or ever really acknowledging that what they were doing was wrong.
• Bastian Balthazar Bux of The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia infamy. Fantasia depends on him to save them but, unlike the previous two films, he's now an incompetent, stupid jackass who does nothing to find his friends that are lost in his world. He doesn't tell his dad about what's going on, even though he found out about it in the second movie, and acts like a jerk when his parents try to help and when he finds out his sister uses his magic wish medallion, even though it was his fault for leaving it behind in the first place.

O

• Out of Darkness: One of the most extreme examples in modern cinema. The "monsters"/neanderthals are framed in the ending as if they are a bunch of innocent, noble, kind-hearted people with high regard for life who acted out of either compassion or self-defense, with the film going hard on the Humans Are the Real Monsters angle. This falls laughably flat because the neanderthals are the aggressors for literally the entire film, starting the whole mess by kidnapping a child from camp in the night, later murdering two of their number in cold blood (with one in particular being killed while he's wounded), killing a third when he attacks them in self-defense, and aggravating the situation all the way with their constant harassment of the group. For all that the movie tries to make it out like the neanderthals are the victims, they're the ones who cause everything bad that happens and their fates come off as more Laser-Guided Karma to a lot of viewers. At best, they come off as incredibly stupid, as it's claimed they were supposedly trying to save Heron because they "knew" he would starve with the group, yet there's no explanation as to why they didn't help the entire tribe nor why they would think they could kidnap a child and not face retaliation. Their funeral for Ave also falls very flat when, again, their actions are what led to the situation that killed her, and they certainly don't come off as reverent of life when they're savagely murdering people at no real provocation.

P

• The male protagonist, Jim Preston, of Passengers. He is a cryogenically preserved passenger on a spaceship that is on a centuries-long mission to colonize another solar system, but he is accidentally awakened decades too early. To avoid going insane from loneliness, he deliberately unfreezes an attractive female passenger, Aurora Lane, and starts a relationship with her... all the while lying to her that her awakening was also accidental. He's meant to be seen as a good person who did a bad thing out of desperation and has to make up for it; reviewers and audiences overwhelmingly saw him as a pathetic douchebag who ruined a complete innocent's life out of selfishness and lust.
  • On the flip-side of the coin, Aurora herself can come off like this to a lesser extent. She is intended to be a tragic figure, but it's just as easy to see her as a spoiled Rich Bitch making a mockery of the efforts of the real colonists as she takes a 250-year-long luxury vacation secure in the idea that she's effectively risking nothing, knowing that her likely safely-invested wealth will be waiting for her back on Earth.
• Pitch Perfect:
  • We're meant to feel sorry for Jesse when Becca yells at him for constantly butting into her business and tells him to leave her alone, but Jesse has been nothing more than an annoying Dogged Nice Guy for the entire movie, criticising Becca's taste in clothes (telling her she'd be beautiful if only she took out her ear spike), constantly badgering her when she makes it clear she's not interested in him and whining when she doesn't share his hobby of watching movies.
  • Not like Becca is much better. She comes off as an ungrateful brat to her father for complaining about having to go to college instead of just going to L.A. to start a career (neither of which come off as realistic, as her father is paying her college for her, therefore she won't have student loans and the idea of starting a career as a DJ in L.A. doesn't sound realistic to college students) and she's unpleasant to everyone she meets, regardless of whether they deserve or not.

R

• Griffin from Red Zone Cuba was meant to be seen as a mostly decent person who was down on his luck and held back by a Hair-Trigger Temper, and what happens to him at the end of the movie was supposed to be tragic and thought-provoking. However, he does nothing even remotely heroic or altruistic at all throughout the entire story; anything he does that seems so (asking for water for a sick man in a POW camp, or treating the wife of said sick man nicely) is merely calculated to advance his own agenda. Griffin was supposed to have fallen beyond sympathy when he rapes a blind girl and murders her father, but he failed to established any sympathy to lose by that point.
• Romeo Must Die: When Han knocks off an attacker's motorcycle helmet, he's shocked to see that the thug is a woman and he's uncomfortable fighting her, even though his girlfriend Trish tells him the woman is trying to kill him and he's within his rights to defend himself. Han takes a third option and has Trish stand in for him. Since she has no fighting skills of her own, he manipulates her hands and feet so that technically she is the one landing the blows and ultimately kills the assassin. This may be one of the film's Signature Scenes, but the fact remains that Han deliberately put a civilian in harm's way for no reason other than a misguided sense of chivalry.
• The Room:
  • Johnny was intended by Tommy Wiseau to be a model boyfriend but instead comes across as a weird, borderline incomprehensible person with creepily obsessive behavior. One standout example is him laughing at the thought of a woman being beaten so badly that she ended up hospitalized. Later on, while in an argument with his girlfriend Lisa where he claims to have never hit or abused her, he shoves her violently into a couch and prevents her from leaving. The Disaster Artist reveals that this had Reality Subtext, as Wiseau had been cheated on multiple times by an unfaithful fiancée, and his personal views of his ex and by extension all women were projected on Lisa.
  • Mark also comes across as this. Yes, the movie treats his affair with Johnny's girlfriend Lisa as unambiguously wrong. But he never accepts responsibility for his role in her infidelity, putting all the blame on her even after Johnny kills himself over it despite the fact that he was equally in the wrong and could easily have refused to betray Johnny; even after the affair started, he could've ended it any time he wanted. Bafflingly, both the other characters and the narrative seem to agree with Mark, treating him like an innocent victim in the whole debacle even though it takes two to tango and he wasn't in any way tricked or coerced into the affair. Even worse, he tries to murder his friend Peter during an argument, something neither Peter nor the movie itself appear to think is a big deal.

S

• The portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, judging by reactions from some critics and historians. The filmmakers want to show Johnson as a complex figure who supports Civil Rights, but a) views it as part of a larger agenda, and b) is restrained by political realities - more or less Truth in Television. But since virtually every scene featuring Johnson shows him trying to block or undermine Martin Luther King's actions, he becomes the film's de facto antagonist; many viewers consider his portrayal bordering on Historical Villain Upgrade.
• In Sex and the City, we're supposed to be sympathetic to Carrie because on the day of her wedding to Big, Big panics and tells her he can't go through with it, leading Carrie to believe she's been jilted at the altar. Except, first of all, Big didn't jilt her - he gets cold feet for a minute before realising his mistake and coming back, telling Carrie that he freaked out for a moment but he's ready now. What does Carrie do? Start screaming at him, hitting him with her bouquet and yelling at him that she's been humiliated...all while causing a scene in the middle of the street. She doesn't even let Big apologise or explain, just immediately assumes the worst, jumps right into the role of victim and gets bundled away from the scene by her friends. Secondly, the wedding went from Carrie and Big confirming their love for each other to being a PR spectacle - Carrie's boss at Vogue tells her they want to do a photoshoot of Carrie, then she gets offered a dress from Vivian Westwood and eventually Carrie invites two-hundred people to the thing without consulting Big on the matter, then gets mad at him for "not taking it seriously". Carrie spends the entire movie acting like she was traumatised by an event that could have been avoided if she'd just taken a second to listen to Big - she even admits she knew something was wrong during the rehearsal dinner but chose to ignore it and Big was unable to contact Carrie before the wedding because Charlotte's five-year-old daughter, Lily, hid Carrie's cellphone. After the wedding she outright compares what happened to her as if someone died and she's in such a Heroic BSoD during the honeymoon that Samantha has to spoonfeed her. Meanwhile, Miranda gets cheated on by Steve and kicks him out, but she doesn't spend the entire movie whining about it and tries to carry on as normal and even manages to be civil to Steve because she doesn't want to upset Brady, but Carrie and the other girls barely give Miranda any sympathy about this. When Miranda admits to Carrie she told Big the night before the wedding he was "crazy to get married" because she'd just seen Steve and was upset, Carrie is furious that Miranda kept this from her and also says she thinks Miranda made a "huge mistake" to let go of Steve. Later, when they make up, Carrie tells Miranda it's crazy that Miranda expects Carrie to forgive her for that after three days but she won't forgive Steve for doing something six months ago. Miranda even asks if, by that logic, they should all forgive Big for what he did, which of course is met with a resounding no from Carrie and Charlotte. Carrie complains throughout the movie that she doesn't want to hear Big's numerous apologies, then when he stops she also complains that he hasn't contacted her - it turned out her assistant, Louise (that Carrie hired to fix her website) had put all Big's emails in a file where Carrie couldn't see them, which Carrie told her to do. Big just can't win no matter what he does and it's easy to feel sympathetic to him when Carrie's selfishness caused the entire wedding fiasco to begin with.
• Inspector Huang from She Shoots Straight, husband of the heroine Mina, whose role is the film's emotional center... and whose death halfway into the film being used to unite his feuding wife and sister to work together in order to avenge his death. But the problem is Huang isn't that likeable of a character, considering he made his wife pregnant by poking holes in a condom (after his mother is desperate to have a grandchild, despite Mina's protests that her career should come first) and in another scene, slapped his own sister for raising her voice on him. The overly long Excessive Mourning that comes after his death doesn't help, either.
• Snow Falling on Cedars:
  • Hatsue Imada is an American Japanese girl who falls in love with the American boy Ismael Chambers. The two become lovers, but have to keep the relationship secret, because at that time Japanese and Americans have racial reservations about each other. When the relationship between the two eventually becomes known, Hatsue leaves Ishmael immediately, "submits" to her family, and marries a Japanese man whom her family has chosen for her. Exactly at the time when Ishmael was injured in the war and lost an arm. A few years later, they see each other again because he is involved in a murder case. Hatsue's husband, Kazuo Miyamoto, is suspected of murdering an American fisherman. And when Ishmael sees Hatsue and greets her, she immediately tells him to leave. During the plot of the film, Ishmael tries to find evidence that Hatsue's husband is innocent. And although Ishmael helps her, Hatsue mistreats him. He tells her several times how much he loves her, but she rejects him again and again. In one scene, he touches her and she wriggles out of his touch as if he were a stranger who wants to do something bad to her (you can also see in this scene that this gesture has hurt Ishmael's feelings). Finally, he at least asks her for one final hug, but Hatsue also denies him, and she knows she is hurting his feelings. Only at the very end of the film, when her husband is acquitted by Ishmael's help, she embraces him. Still, she does not seem to think it was wrong for her to treat him so badly.
  • Her husband also qualifies for it. Kazuo marries her, even though it is a forced marriage for Hatsue (to be fair, it's possible he didn't know she was forced to marry him by her family). Already at the beginning of the film, he wants to buy a property, and the wife whose husband owns the property is threatened and intimidated by him. Later, when he meets her husband, he starts a business, but Kazuo is anything but polite to him. Later, when he is killed, Kazuo also says that he would have liked to kill him (even if he finally proves he did not).
  • The film is likely to show that Japanese living in the US at that time suffered racial reservations from the Americans. However, Hatsue and Kazuo are such jerks that many viewers wonder why they should feel sorry for them.
• In A Star Is Born (2018), we're meant to root for and sympathise with Jackson Maine, despite the fact that he's a whining, selfish Jerkass. The whole movie pretty much documents his downward spiral when his girlfriend Ally becomes more successful and famous than him, leading to drink himself into oblivion and constantly lash out at her and undermine her out of jealousy. He has several Kick the Dog moments that are excused because he had a bad relationship with his father, such as getting into a petty argument with his brother Bobby who spent years cleaning up after his messes, humiliating Ally on national television when she's about to receive an award, calling her ugly and untalented, etc. When Rez (Ally's manager) gives him an extremely well-deserved "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how all he does is drag her down with his addictions and selfishness, Jackson responds by committing suicide, which is treated as a Downer Ending and nobody comments that by doing that he devastated Ally even more instead of making a genuine effort to atone for his horrible treatment of her.
• In Star Trek: Insurrection, the Ba'ku were supposed to come off as innocent victims of an under-the-table Federation and the devious Son'a (who are actually exiled Ba'ku), but instead, they came off as selfish, self-righteous pricks who won't share (or tolerate anyone of their own who wants to share) their planet's amazing healing powers, leaving the rest of the galaxy to die of ailments they themselves easily overcame. Not helping matters is that there are only a few hundred of them, so the vast majority of the planet is uninhabited. It's worth noting that Picard's argument that moving them violated the Prime Directive doesn't even hold up, since they were an non-indigenous group of Luddites, so they had no more valid a claim to the planet than the Federation colonists. It also doesn't help that the movie, despite clearly treating their relocation as the Trail of Tears in space, doesn't at all play up the imagery of that event. On the contrary, the Ba'ku could be argued to look more like the people who were historically responsible for the Trail and its miseries in the first place. Roger Ebert described them as a "gated community." Making it stand out even more an episode of the series had followed a very similar plot with actual Native American-descended colonists who made the comparison explicit, for stakes that amounted to nothing but a political technicality... and Picard took the other side.
• Star Wars
  • The Prequel Trilogy:
    • Padmé's tragic, doomed romance with Anakin doesn't really work out when at no point did the trilogy furnish a reason (besides maybe good looks) for her to be attracted to him. He's surly, immature, violent, insubordinate, vaguely fascistic, and sworn to not fall in love, and she's known him for about a week. She has every reason in the world to not get secretly married to him, which makes her come across as a suicidally vapid idiot, an utterly passive abuse victim, and/or just a gigantic hypocrite for doing exactly that.
    • The Separatist Alliance is meant to be seen as a noble cause that was twisted and exploited by Palpatine making them as much of a victim as the Republic. The opening crawl of Revenge of the Sith even states "There are heroes on both sides". The problem is that none of the films or Star Wars: The Clone Wars ever show the good qualities of the Separatist movement, beyond a couple of citizens who end up defecting to the Republic. The Separatist leadership highlighted are warmongers at best, and sociopaths at worst. Any instances of heroic members of the Separatist Alliance or Separatist sympathizers get relegated to Expanded Universe novels and comics, a large amount of which is no longer considered canon following Disney's acquisition of the franchise.
    • The entire Jedi Order gets this in the prequel trilogy. They're meant to be the Big Good organization, a group of Lawful Good magic knights, but possessed the Fatal Flaw of being too bound up by centuries-old dogma to see something terrible is about to happen until it's tragically too late to prevent it. Unfortunately, their questionable recruiting tactics of conscripting young children and cutting them off from all family ties, taking command of an age-accelerated slave army of clones, their unflinching support for an absurdly corrupt Failed State, and their grandmaster Yoda giving some astonishingly tone-deaf advice to a terrified Anakin made them look like a bunch of Church Militant jackasses instead. The fact that they constantly babble about ideals "freedom" and "democracy" while doing very little to actually uphold them is just the icing on the cake. Likely as a response to these complaints, subsequent media like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Last Jedi would paint the organization in an intentionally less flattering light.
  • The Last Jedi
    • Admiral Holdo is intended to be a reasonable leader who prioritizes survival instead of suicidal heroics. However, she came off as incompetent and stubborn given how she treated her crew, especially Poe Dameron. After failing to motivate her troops, Holdo dismisses Poe's concerns seemingly to teach him some humility. While withholding the specifics from Poe might seem reasonable given they don't know how they're being tracked and Poe can be careless, some felt that she could've at least given assurance of a general strategy. The reveal of her plan (and that Leia supported it) doesn't help much, since it reveals that Poe would have gone along with it had she only trusted him. Even if Holdo was right that Poe is a loose cannon who needed to be knocked down a peg, she still failed to keep him and the crew in line, resulting in Poe being able to garner support for a mutiny. Subsequently, Holdo's sacrifice is visually stunning, but her action still felt hollow as she had to make it because she couldn't maintain order among her subordinates.
    • Rose Tico prevents Finn from pulling a Heroic Sacrifice by ramming his Speeder into the First Order's cannon. This is meant to be seen as an act of altruism, stopping Finn from getting consumed by revenge and throwing his life away needlessly. The issue is that the cannon is aiming for the literal last line of defense for the Resistance, as all of their allies have either been destroyed or ignored their cry for help. While the film tries to frame it like Finn had zero chance of stopping the cannon by showing his speeder melting in the laser's charge-up, the Star Wars franchise has a penchant for Ramming Always Works, with a successful example even occurring earlier in the film. Furthermore, given the dire state of the Resistance is in, Finn trying to tip the odds no matter his motives or how slim the chances are is admirable. With Luke not having made his presence known yet, as far as anybody knew Rose just signed their death warrant and doomed the entire Galaxy to be ruled by the First Order. Not to mention it's a miracle that Rose crashing her speeder into Finn's didn't kill both of them.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: The film has Ben Solo pull a Heel–Face Turn thanks in large part due to his love for Rey. The problem is that throughout the entire trilogy (even this very film) Ben acted abusive towards Rey causing her physical and psychological harm, constantly gaslighting Rey into thinking he was the only person who cared for her, when that's patently false. Ben was even inches away from killing Rey in this film, which was only prevented thanks to his mother, Leia, pulling an intervention that cost Leia her life. Furthermore, Ben was offered multiple chances to walk away from the Dark Side in prior films but chose to reject help and double down on his villainy, which causes many to see his turn as unearned and too little, too late.
• The alien in Super 8. We're instructed by the script to feel sorry for the way it was treated by the military and root for it to return home, just like E.T., even when it starts lashing out and killing people who had absolutely nothing to do with its mistreatment and posed no threat to it, very much unlike E.T. That it's intelligent enough for the kids to reason with suggests it didn't kill innocent people due to panicked self-preservation, but out of revenge (and by proxy, at that), which makes the ending seem like a miscarriage of justice to many viewers, instead of the "D'aww!" moment it was meant to be.

T

• In the 2010 UK TV Movie Toast, based on Nigel Slater's biographic novel, the plot shows Nigel's love of food and his attempts to impress his father who is cold especially after the death of his mother. The film follows him trying to compete with Mrs Potter the housekeeper whom Nigel's father later marries and he spends the movies locking horns with. However, the problem is the protagonist is accidentally unlikable, Mrs Potter is only the Wicked Stepmother because Nigel as a kid refused to be polite to her, he's snobbish about her common, vulgar behaviour, but ever then it's clear she is a good person and even when she tries to build a bridge after his Father's death he breaks it. The reviews on IMDB shows the Broken Base this film has.
• In the movie Trainwreck, the main character, Amy, and her sister go and visit their Dad in a care home to tell him that Kim is pregnant. He's happy about the news and says he's excited to finally have a grandkid. Kim gets offended and says he's forgetting her step-son, Alistair. He says he cares about the boy and worries about him getting bullied but he's not, technically, a blood-relative. Kim gets so offended she yells at him and storms out, and because he was an Alcoholic Parent to Amy and Kim when they were kids, we're obviously meant to sympathize with her. But the thing is, the Dad is right in this situation and considering Kim wanted to put him in the worst care home she could find and throws out his possessions when she's sorting through them with Amy, it makes her look incredibly petty and looking for an excuse to be pissed off at him.
• While a great majority of his characters are sympathetic (intentionally or otherwise), several others in Tyler Perry's films come off as this:
  • Dr. Patricia Agnew in Why Did I Get Married? and its sequel. She was initially seen as a Stepford Smiler who used her intelligence and training to offer valuable advice on how to fix her friends' marriages and to hide the pain of her being the indirect cause of her son's death in a car crash, as she didn't strap him in properly. Unfortunately, all of this knowledge did nothing to help her own marriage which ended due to her cold, analytical personality and her greed and misguided attempt at revenge against her ex-husband, Gavin, caused him to be killed in a car crash himself after she ran him off of his job.
  • Byron from Madea's Big Happy Family. Although he goes through lots of hardship in the film (a past jail sentence for drugs, said sentence preventing him from getting a legitimate job, being caught between a pair of terrible women and finding out two heartbreaking secrets; that both his mother is dying and that his real mother was his older sister, who had conceived him through rape), this still does nothing to quell his lack of any drive to do better for himself, to properly provide for his young son or the admission that he likes being in the middle of a love triangle with both women, in spite of the fact one is a Gold Digger and the other is the baby's mother from Hell.
  • Madea herself, despite being the protagonist of many of his films, comes off as this due to her abrasive personality and not being afraid to blatantly and repeatedly break the law. Madea Goes to Jail showcases that she has a criminal record dating back to childhood and the last straw (her dumping an obnoxious lady's car out of the space that she wanted) sent her to prison for a few years. When word got out, several (but not all) people were in support of her being released even though she really didn't deserve it and didn't learn anything from it.

U-V

• In Unstoppable, main character Will Colson's wife has a restraining order against him, keeping him from being able to see his son. The reason for the restraining order is because he suspected his wife was cheating on him, then he got upset when she wouldn't submit to his spot check of her cell phone, grabbed her violently, pulled a gun on a police officer as well as a friend of his because he suspected he's sleeping with his wife, and she turned out to not even be cheating on him. Because he's one of the heroes of the movie, we're meant to sympathize with him and hope that he can get back together with his wife, despite the fact that he acted exactly as cartoonishly-evil as the villainous male lead of any given Lifetime Movie of the Week.
• Upside-Down Magic: Every single teacher at the Sage Academy, except the Fluxer teacher and Bud Skriff. Their behavior makes Reina use Shadow Magic and turn accidentally into a shadow monster. Why? Because they were very aloof towards Nory - Reina's best friend and the other abnormal students.
• The Violent Years: Paula is treated as a Tragic Villain driven to crime by Parental Neglect. They really just seem only slightly inattentive, which makes Paula's complaints absurdly trivial, especially considering the severity of the crimes she commits for no other reason then thrills or attention.

W-X

• Jeremy Collier from the 1996 film The War at Home is supposed to be portrayed as a shell-shocked Jerkass Woobie who went through the most horrific experience when he was in the Vietnam War, and has difficulty readjusting his social life. Yes, being involved in a war is very traumatizing, but instead of ever sharing his experiences with his family, or even have a man-to-man talk with his father (played by Martin Sheen) about it, he constantly lashes and cusses out at his family, refuses to spend time with them even during Thanksgiving, never bothered to reveal that horrific experience he had until the very end of the film, and blatantly just angrily smashes the religious plague they tried to offer him. The father is understandably irritated with Jeremy, and it's not hard to understand why he's finally fed up with him, and threw him out of the house.
• The Whale: Ellie is presented as being justifiably angry that her father walked out on her at a young age, but her behavior in the film points less to her simply being hurt and acting out and more towards outright psychopathy. She posts pictures of dead animals online, makes violent threats to her schoolmates, insults and abuses Charlie at every turn (even drugging him at one point), and helps Thomas purely by accident, as she couldn't imagine that a family would want to reconcile with their son. Charlie's need to believe that she really is a good person reaches the point of being delusional. Her mother, who has equal reason to be angry at Charlie, seems to have made her peace with his decision and considers her daughter nothing less than a monster.
• When Evil Calls: Samantha is the overall protagonist but she is an awful person. She callously disregards the deaths and mutilations of her classmates that are the result of her wish to be popular and consistently decides that she would rather retain her popularity and relationship with her dream crush, Daniel, than stop the destruction caused by the wishes. She ditches her unpopular best friend to become more popular and later, after Victoria has made her beautiful after giving a makeover, steals Victoria's boyfriend after Victoria becomes disfigured and Samantha is way more beautiful than her.
• The Wizard of Oz:
  • It contains one of the most infamous examples in film. The movie combined two witches — the Good Witch of the North and Glinda the Good Witch of the South — into one character. This creates an Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole where Glinda gives Dorothy the red slippers but doesn't tell her how they work, causing her to go on a journey and nearly die just for Glinda to tell her later. This has caused generations of viewers to consider Glinda a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing or wonder if Glinda was really the villain and that she sent a random child on a wild goose chase to kill her enemy. More than a few jokes have been made about this, such as the Mad TV "alternate ending" sketch where Dorothy calls out Glinda.
  • The title character himself also qualifies. As written, the Wizard is supposed to be a loving and caring grandfatherly character who doesn't want people to find out he's really a humbug. However, he sends a teenage girl and her companions to kill arguably the most dangerous person in Oz (who has already tried to kill Dorothy and her companions several times) and bring back the witch's broom as proof... pretty much unarmed against the impenetrable castle and the Witch's loyal army of flying monkeys. His claims of being "a good man but a really bad wizard" come off as less apologetic for being unable to help and more trying to justify his own actions. ^note  His actions in the books make him an even more dubious figure — sending rightful ruler Ozma into slavery under Mombi, bespelled as the wrong gender. As a result, modern takes on the Oz mythos play up his shady moral character and usually play him as an outright villain.
• X-Men: Apocalypse: It's a mild case, but Pietro wanting to meet his biological father Magneto and form a relationship with him. Whilst wanting to know about one's absent biological parent and perhaps even meet them is very much understandable; what's not understandable is that Pietro still wants to bond with his birth-father, when he already knows full well that said father is an infamous terrorist-on-the-run whom Pietro personally saw on international television attempting to assassinate the heart of U.S. government while espousing disturbing eugenic revolution-ideology. In-Universe, it's like an average guy wanting to meet his long-lost uncle Hitler. The film does slightly address this when Pietro somewhat trepidly asks Raven if his birth-father is as bad as his reputation, but it's not enough in light of what this entry has already described.

---