Villain Protagonist / Live-Action Films

• 22 July: Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right terrorist responsible for the deaths of 77 innocents, is front and center for a good half of the film, the remainder alternating between his victims (Viljar Hansen being the most prominent) and investigators.
• All the protagonists and antagonists in the Spanish movie Acción Mutante are villains, fighting each other for selfish reasons like money, sex or spite - not even because the other villain's kind of evil is worse. Even the minor characters are unsympathetic (e.g. the misogynist hillbilly miners; the ridiculously-posh, biased TV journalists).
• Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole (1951): He's a washed-up, amusingly cynical, charismatic, and brilliantly manipulative newspaper writer who dooms a man to death in a collapsed cave by prolonging and milking the rescue attempt - he's confident the man will make it through several days in there - just so he can report on it and restore his career. He regrets what he does in the end, but it's doesn't much matter because it's a World Half Empty where most of the characters don't care about the life at stake, and instead take his lead and encouragement to profit off of the literal media carnival that springs up in its wake of this "Human-Interest Story".
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Don Lope de Aguirre is an insane, megalomaniacal conquistador who wants to marry his own daughter. He leads his army on a doomed, nightmarish expedition through South America in search of a treasure that might not exist, purely because he wants to become king.
• Amadeus: Salieri declares war on God, and sets out to destroy Mozart simply because he believes that Mozart is loved by God.
• American Me: The main character Montoya Santana is a leading member of the Mexican Mafia.
• In American Psycho, you follow the psychopathic killer Patrick Bateman. Or at best, not-killer but corrupt executive with an ambiguous disorder.
• Captain Anne Providence, the protagonist of Anne of the Indies, is a pirate captain, and an extremely ruthless one when she has to be.
• Massai in Apache is a renegade warrior waging a one-man war against the white man, and especially the US Army. While he has justifications for his actions, they are still criminal. However, what really pushes him into this category is when he admits that he is no longer fighting for the Apache cause, which he considers lost. He is now just fighting for the sake of fighting.
• The Assignment (2016): Frank admits right in the opening voiceover monologue that he's a bad guy, and has probably deserved even more than what was done to him after he killed so many people. However, he isn't completely bad, and is seeking revenge on people that are on his level or even worse than him.
• Assault on a Queen is about a group of morally dubious treasure hunters who salvage a German U-boat and use it to become Submarine Pirates: staging an assault on the RMS Queen Mary. Several of the characters get cold feet and express doubts about the plan, but none of them actually pull out.
• Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. The film's production team consider the film to be his "hero journey". Several reviewers also call Thanos the "real hero" of the film, with "hero" being a loanword of sorts for this trope. It's worth noting that he also has far more screen time than any other character.
• The protagonist of The Bad and the Beautiful is a ruthless movie producer who scruples not to lie, cheat, steal, seduce, and con to get his movies made. The film is narrated by three of the people whom he chewed up and spat out on his way to the top.
• Bad Education (2019): Frank Tassone, who masterminded a long-term conspiracy wherein $11.2 million was stolen from the school district.
• In Bad Girls from Valley High, three snobbish high school girls prematurely age brought on from a curse, a drug (or something) after the arrival of new transfer student whom they believe is connected to a murder they committed a year earlier.
• Terrence McDonaugh in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. He's a Rabid Cop who also a drug and gambling addict, steals from other cops and suspects, tortures people he interrogates, and blackmails female suspects to have sex with him. The only redeeming qualities he has is that he still loves his family and girlfriend, and draws the line at point blank murder. By the time the film's ending comes around, he still hasn't changed his drug-inducing habits one little bit and goes largely unpunished for all his crimes.
• In the Korean film Bedevilled, Kim Bok-nam evolves into this. She starts out being a victim of abuse and neglect, where everyone around her refuses to come to her aid or punish those who assault or even rape her, which eventually culminates in her daughter being accidentally killed by her repulsive husband. When even her childhood friend, Hae-won, doesn't stand up for her or seek justice for her daughter's death, she decides to grab a sickle and go on a killing spree, which ends in almost the entire cast (sans Hae-won) perishing by the time the movie's over.
• Title character Leslie Vernon of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon spends much of the movie preparing for a killing spree and demonstrating how the killers in slasher flicks do what they do.
• Big Jim Mc Lain features a "hero" who works for Senator Joseph McCarthy (yes, that McCarthy), and beats the living snot out of liberals in Hawaii. Made worse by the fact that this "hero" is played by John Wayne. To be fair he is targeting "communists", but the definition seems to be more than a little... general.
• In the first act of the Bird Box spin-off, Bird Box Barcelona, it's revealed that the protagonist Sebastián is a seer, a person driven mad by seeing the creatures and sent to find surviving humans to force them to see as well. He is guided by a hallucination of his late daughter, telling him to find survivors and make them see the creatures so they would take their lives and "ascend" to heaven. In the final act, he finds out the truth about the creatures and that he's been senselessly killing innocent people, and dies helping the last remaining characters get to safety as he holds off the other seers.
• The Black Godfather: Our main character, J.J., is a crime lord who controls everything but drugs in the local black community, explicitly including prostitution and protection rackets. The main reason the audience roots for him is that the antagonists are heroin dealers and much more violent than he.
• The Black Room: Gregor de Berghman, a baron who killed his brother to steal his identity and title and rules with an iron fist.
• Blackthorn is a fictional account of an aged Butch Cassidy living under the assumed name James Blackthorn in a secluded village in Bolivia 20 years after his disappearance in 1908.
• The Bling Ring from Sofia Coppola is most definitely this, as it follows a group of teenagers that rob celebrities' homes. What makes Nicki stand out is that she's portrayed by Emma Watson.
• The Brides of Sodom: Eros starts as this, being a vampire who regularly goes out to hunt down the last remnants of humanity to devour. However, falling in love with Samuel leads him to oppose the toxic system he lives in. That said he does feed out of necessity.
• A Bucket of Blood follows Walter Paisley, a young man so desperate to befriend the local beatniks that he kills people and makes sculptures from the bodies.
• Cabin by the Lake centers around horror movie writer Stanley Cauldwell, who's knowingly and obviously evil as a depraved serial killer of women.
• The title character from Caligula, which depicts the reign of the Ax-Crazy Roman emperor.
• The Candy Tangerine Man: Roy "The Black Baron" Lewis, a pimp who spends the film brutalizing anybody who stands in his way and lies to his family about what he does. He does redeem himself by the end, but is still a brutal murderer.
• Carlota Joaquina, Princesa do Brasil portrays the titular character as an bitchy, manipulative, racist, vindictive, power-hungry, backstabing, man-eating vamp. It's mostly satirical in nature so her character is probably exaggerated.
• Casino: Sam "Ace" Rothstein and Nicky Santoro.
• Frank Abagnale Jr., the protagonist of Catch Me If You Can, is an adrift and young counterfeiter and con man who uses his natural cleverness to make some money, and his antagonist, Hanratty, is an FBI agent trying to, well, Catch Him if He Can. In the end Frank with Hanratty's support eventually goes straight.
• Cecil B. Demented and his Sprocket Holes. One of them is a satanist!
• The eponymous character of Charley Varrick is a career bank robber, who we first see robbing a bank. However, given that the movie is about him trying to escape the consequences when the bank he hits turns out to be a money laundry for the Mob, he played entirely fair with his fellow gang members until they tried to screw him over (at which point he unhesitatingly arranged for them to fall into the hands of the antagonists), avoided killing innocent bystanders (again unlike the antagonists), tragically lost his (fellow bank robber) wife in the opening scene, and faced off against a Mafia hitman, he's easy to root for.
• Mike Tyson plays one in the 2017 Chinese war movie China Salesman. Interestingly, the movie's marketing implies that Tyson co-stars with Steven Seagal, and that one of them is the Villain Protagonist while the other one is the Hero Antagonist (or that this is a case of Evil Versus Evil). However, Steven Seagal is really just an Advertised Extra who does not even have a role in the movie in the true sense of the word – instead, several close-up shots of him are awkwardly spliced into a few scenes, amounting to just a few seconds of screentime which also create glaring continuity errors in those scenes.
• A Clockwork Orange. The first act of the film has Alex DeLarge, our protagonist, as a blatant villain. In the rest of the film, however, he's a helpless victim. In the film version of the story, the biggest villain turns out to be the government, who try to play God with a man's mind, screw up, and ultimately sweep it under the rug and make a deal with a psychopath.
• Color Me Blood Red: Adam Sorg, a Serial Killer who makes paintings with his victims' blood.
• In The Con is On, the protagonists Harry and Peter and con artists and thieves who dabble in drug dealing. They are marginally nicer than the people chasing them, but not by much.
• Every character in Conspiracy (2001) (which features an Ensemble Cast) is a high-ranking official of a totalitarian regime engaging in wars of conquest and extermination, while their objective is to organize a continental genocide.
• The main characters of The Cottage are David and Peter, two bungling kidnappers.
• Woody Allen loves the Trope, as Judah of Crimes and Misdemeanors follows a similar path to the protagonist of Match Point. Judah wrings his hands a lot, but he's still evil.
• The unnamed "She" from Day Night Day Night is an aspiring terrorist.
• The Ensemble Cast of A Day of Judgment is full of sinners sho commit various heinous acts before the Angel of Death comes after them.
• William and his gang in Dead Birds. The most important thing to them is fleeing to Mexico with the gold, which they stole from a band of soldiers that they brutally murdered. Even Todd is Not So Above It All, being mostly concerned with just getting out of the house without suffering a Fate Worse than Death, gold be damned.
• Dead Hooker in a Trunk: Badass is a violent hedonist who can't conclusively rule out murdering a prostitute on a drunken bender, and is perfectly willing to do anything to hide the body. The other protagonists are more neutral, with Badass being the only one who actually kills anybody.
• Dear God No!: Jett, a violent biker leading his gang on a raping and murdering spree.
• Deathtrap: Michael Caine as a man who murders his wife and seduces his secretary.
• Delusions of Grandeur: While most of Louis de Funès's roles were at worst Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists, Don Salluste is a true bad guy (with Blaze as his Beleaguered Assistant). A corrupt, greedy, snobbish, bad-tempered nobleman who is enjoying abusing his power and living in luxuries on the back of the people of Spain and without any redeeming quality. Whether as an Evil Tax Collector, or later after his disgrace scheming to discredit the Queen at all costs. Still, he stays Laughably Evil throughout. And, as De Funès performance always shows, the slapstick he suffers all over the movie is Laser-Guided Karma.
• Tony Wendice in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and Steven Taylor in the pseudo-remake A Perfect Murder. Both discover that their wives (who are each independently wealthy) are cheating on them and, not wanting to divorce them and lose out on the money, cook up elaborate schemes to murder them instead.
• Deranged: Ezra Cobb, a fictionalized depiction of the notorious Grave Robbing Serial Killer Ed Gein.
• Die You Zombie Bastards!: Red Toole is a Serial Killer of hippies, and we only root for him because he's fighting against the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Dobermann centres on Dobermann and his gang of bank robbers, who are in no way heroic. However, the police are almost as bad.
• Doctor Blood's Coffin: Dr. Peter Blood, a Mad Scientist willing to kill for his experiments.
• The main characters of Doll from Hell are a group of thugs who stole money from the Yakuza and are willing to kill innocents to keep it.
• Downfall (2004) is a film which follows Adolf Hitler as he lives out his last days in World War II. You hardly get more bad guy protagonist than that. The film flits between depicting him as sort of a dignified old captain going down with his sinking ship, and depicting him as an irrational, condescending and spiteful man who believes sympathy is a weakness and has no problem with blaming others for his own failures and demanding the German people fight to the death down to the last man, woman and child in horrid conditions while he sits in a comfortable bunker without firing a single shot at the enemy.
• The Driller Killer: Reno starts off as a Jerkass artist who spends his day hating on the homeless, and eventually the stress of his life leads him to become a Serial Killer.
• The protagonists of The Eagle Has Landed are a group of German commandos trying to assassinate Winston Churchill under orders from Heinrich Himmler. The film does establish that the commandos themselves are honorable men concerned only with their mission and are disgusted by the war crimes they witness, even if their bosses might be mass murderers.
• Election: Jim Mcallister is a thirty-something high school teacher. He sets out to ruin the life of a bright, ambitious teenage girl because he doesn't like her - partly because she's pretty annoying, but mostly because after she was groomed and sexually abused by another teacher who happened to be Jim's friend, the teacher lost his job and his marriage. Jim thinks she should suffer, so he decides to thwart her campaign for student council president. He fails even at this.
• Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz, who is a robber and a multiple prison escapee.
• William "D-FENS" Foster from Falling Down. He's dangerously insane and becomes increasingly violent, but at the same time he's also clearly a victim of powers beyond his control, and the audience is encouraged to feel catharsis through his actions even as the movie condemns them.
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! concerns Varla, Rosie and Billie, a trio of go-go dancers who went on the run after robbing their boss. Varla is easily the most villainous, being perfectly willing to commit kidnapping and murder to stay out of prison.
• Matsu from the Female Prisoner Scorpion films is, not too surprisingly, a prisoner. Put away for attempted murder, she goes on to kill and cause to be killed many more times before the series ends, her victims including the prison warden at least two detectives and several other policemen. The facts that one of the detectives, the man she tried and failed to kill, seduced her and arranged her rape purely to allow him to arrest the rapists and corruptly take over their business, that the prison warden tortured her, locked her underground in chains for a year, had her raped and ultimately tried to stage her death, and that she never kills senselessly, only makes her less villainous relatively speaking.
• The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, Peter Sellers' final film, is an Affectionate Parody (with roots in The Goon Show) that makes Fu Manchu charming and a bit sympathetic in his unrepentant wickedness. Having been thwarted so many times by the British, and on the brink of death, the whole plot hinges on him creating a youth elixir to save himself.
• A Fistful of Dynamite: Juan Miranda, at first.
• Flavia the Heretic: Battered and beaten, Flavia starts planning a violent mission of revenge against the Church and everyone in it. She soon finds herself in a position of freedom and ultimate power, and with a Muslim army in tow, she leads her warriors back to the convent to castrate, rape, and kill all in their path.
• Flesh for Frankenstein: Baron Frankenstein, who is obsessed with making a perfect Serbian race to obey his commands, beginning by assembling a perfect male and female from parts of corpses.
• Flesh for the Beast: Erin is revealed to be this near the end, due to being a succubus struck by amnesia. She wasn't evil in her human identity, but immediately revels in murder when her memories return.
• Four Lions: a comedy about aspiring jihadist suicide bombers.
• Frankenstein's Army: Dmitri, a Soviet spy who misled his fellow soldiers into capturing a Nazi Mad Scientist that his bosses want captured alive, and is willing to threaten their loved ones to keep them compliant. Even when he learns about the scientist's human experimentation, he's perfectly happy to let him do such unabated to get the data.
• Theo, the protagonist of Der Freie Wille, is a serial rapist.
• From Dusk Till Dawn: Seth and Richie Gecko, a duo of ruthless criminals on the run. Seth ends up being the sole protagonist after Richie is killed by the vampires.
• Frontier(s): The main characters are on the run after taking advantage of riots to rob a bank.
• The Galaxy Invader: Joe Montague, a redneck who abuses his entire family and wants to kill an alien for the money.
• The Godfather has the Corleone Family as the main protagonists, more specifically: Vito and Michael Corleone.
• Godzilla has been this through half of his films.
• Maindrian Pace in Gone in 60 Seconds (1974) steals cars for a living, though he makes sure that the cars are insured. The remake averts the trope. Although the protagonist is also a car thief, he's being blackmailed into performing the heist by the real villains.
• GoodFellas: Henry Hill, Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez is an Anti-Villain protagonist (if not an Anti-Hero).
• The Gray Man (2007): Albert Fish, a paedophilic Serial Killer. However, he's not the only protagonist, as the detective pursuing him gets roughly equal screentime.
• In The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, protagonist George Fowler is a college dropout hired to be the Getaway Driver in a Bank Robbery.
• Hack-O-Lantern: Tommy may be our main character, but he's willingly going along with his grandpa's plan to make him a Satanic cult leader. Until he realizes what he's being dragged into and quits, that is.
• The Halloween remakes by Rob Zombie put Michael Myers as either the main protagonist (in the first half of the first movie), or dual protagonist alongside Laurie. The remakes go into depth to make Michael more sympathetic, giving him a rough upbringing rather than him being a normal boy who just decided to kill his family, and even made some of his kills either self-defense or mercy killings. Laurie is also more villainous, dreaming about killing her friend Annie in the sequel, and having violent outbursts. The movie ends with her trying to kill Dr. Loomis, before the police shoot her down.
• Peyton, the Yandere from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
• Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising, although it's more of a Roaring Rampage of Revenge at that stage.
• Hard Candy. Both the protagonists. Jeff is a predatory pedophile, and Hayley is a fledgling Serial Killer.
• Neil McCauley in Heat is a ruthless bank robber, but he has an equal role in the story as Vincent Hanna, the cop trying to catch him.
• Henry, the eponymous character from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Unlike other examples of this trope, though, he's not Affably Evil or an Anti-Villain in the slightest. In fact, he's so cold and emotionless that he comes across as barely human, and routinely commits some of the most horrific murders in film history.
• The protagonist of Hollow Triumph is Johnny Muller is a small-time crook who knocks over a Mob casino and then kills a Identical Stranger and steals his life as the perfect means of hiding out.
• The Firefly Family are the villains of House of 1000 Corpses, but the sequel, The Devil's Rejects, makes them the protagonists of the movie. They're utterly depraved and valueless serial killers, but the audience is able to relate to their deep emotional ties as a family. To spice things up, the movie has a particularly crazy Knight Templar hero who is himself quite compelling.
• The Iceman: Richard Kuklinski, a hitman who killed over 100 people over the course of his career.
• The protagonists of The Immortals are a mismatched crew of petty criminals assembled to pull off a one time big score by Robbing the Mob Bank.
• In Infamous (2020), two young lovers rob their way across the southland, posting their exploits to social media and gaining fame and followers as a result in an attempt to win Fame Through Infamy.
• The plot of Inglorious Basterds is about the Basterds' and Shoshana Dreyfus's separate plans to kill the Nazi high command at a film premiere but it's Col. Hans Landa of the SS who gets the most screen time.
• In the Norwegian film Insomnia, the protagonist Engström begins as a moderately corrupt detective (though he's highly regarded by his peers). By the end, he's descended into pure evil, partially caused by the madness of working in 24-hour sunlight above the Arctic Circle but mostly due to his own inner lack of humanity. The final shot of his dead, haunted eyes is one of the creepier endings in film.
• Chad from In the Company of Men is a rude sexist Jerkass who gets a woman to fall in love with him just so he can break her heart later on for his own amusement. He runs a business and treats his employees like dirt. He later betrays his "friend" Howard, getting him demoted at work and driving him and his girlfriend to depression.
• I Shot Andy Warhol: While she's depicted sympathetically, there's no getting around the fact that Valerie Solanas is a psychopath who only misses being a murderer because she's not a very good shot.
• In Island of Death, Christopher and Celia are a pair of bigoted serial killers targeting completely innocent people on the peaceful Greek island of Mykonos.
• The protagonist of I Stand Alone is a violent ex-butcher who pummels his pregnant girlfriend into a miscarriage, plans to murder random people who cross him, and molests his daughter.
• Joker (2019): Arthur Fleck, despite sympathetic moments, hunts down and kills a man who assaulted him well after the danger has passed, romantically stalks his neighbor, kills his own mother in cold blood, kills a man for getting him fired, kills a comedian who insulted him, shows no remorse over a deadly riot he's partially responsible for, may or may not have killed a psychiatrist, and likely goes on to kill many more as The Joker.
• The central character of A Jolly Bad Fellow is Professor Kerris Bowles-Otterly: a Social Darwinist who embarks upon a campaign of poisoning everyone who annoys him or stands in his way.
• The titular Kate is an unrepentant professional killer. On learning that she has only 24 hours to live, she decides to kill several more people.
• Telly, the main character in the independent film Kids, is everything you don't want your child to be.
• Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me is an accomplished serial killer and domestic abuser masquerading as an honest cop, and genuinely enjoys all the murders he commits.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets: The protagonist's mother, the daughter of a duke, is disowned by her family after eloping with an opera singer. In revenge, the protagonist plots to murder every relative standing between himself and the dukedom. While simultaneously leading on both Betty and Veronica. And it's all played for laughs.
• King of New York is the heartwarming saga of a couple of violent drug dealers (played by Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne) who just want to sell drugs, kill people that cross them, and build a few hospitals for poor people.
• In Kiss of the Tarantula, Susan is a spider-obsessed Creepy Child (who grows into a creepy teen) with a Sympathetic P.O.V.: her first victim is her mother, who was plotting her father's murder. The next set were teens who broke into her house, threatened to rape her and killed one of her pet spiders. (and it's implied she was just trying to scare them). Bo, on the other hand, she killed to shut him up.
• Bridget Gregory of The Last Seduction, a Con Artist who steals $700,000 from her equally crooked (but much less clever) husband and spends the rest of the movie scheming to bump him off and get away with it. She succeeds, and her Unwitting Pawn goes to prison in her place.
• The Last Supper (1996) is about a group of progressive liberals who start killing people whose politics they find evil. Whatever morality they might have begun with gets slowly discarded as they descend a slippery slope of murder.
• The League of Gentlemen — ex-British Army officers turned bank robbers.
• All four of the main characters of Little Sweetheart are various forms of criminals, with the one with the most screentime being the worst.
• Jodie Foster's character from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. An interesting case, because her killing is more of a survival tactic than true villainy, but her actions are a little too extreme to describe as "antihero". Plus, it's not (usually) so much a matter of physical survival, but of preserving what amounts to a set of hippie values. Which is subversive in all kinds of great ways.
• In Long John Silver, the eponymous Pirate hopes to rescue his friend Jim from a rival pirate and return for more treasure.
• Long Pigs: The two unnamed filmmakers who stand by and let a cannibalistic Serial Killer do his thing so they can film it, and sometimes assist.
• Yuri Orlov in Lord of War is a gunrunner who sells weapons to anybody, including violent dictators and human rights violators. We're shown what a disaster his love life and family relationships are in such a way that you have to stop and feel sorry for him.
• The Losers (1970): Link Thomas, leader of the Devil's Advocates, is revealed to have been convicted of rape a few years before the film's beginning. He has learned nothing from the incident, and is convinced that he was persecuted for being a biker hippie.
• The trio of the protagonists in Fassbinder's Film Noir Love Is Colder Than Death. The first of them is a pimp and rapist, the second is a violent killer-for-hire working for Mob, and seemingly the least evil of them is a prostitute, but she also doesn't disdain of murdering people, including Innocent Bystanders.
• Lust for Gold: There are really no heroes in this film. Jakob Walz is a murderer and thief, while Julia Thomas is a Con Artist and an adulterer.
• The Mad Monster: Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, a Mad Scientist setting his werewolf creation on academic rivals who mocked his theories.
• Benoit, from the mockumentary about a serial killer, Man Bites Dog.
• In A Man Called Sledge, James Garner plays a grimly evil outlaw who connives his way into a prison in hopes of getting his hands on a large shipment of gold stored there.
• Paul from The Manhattan Project, when he's not bullying the school nerd with chemical explosives, he's building nuclear weapons that he then uses to hold the military hostage until he gets his way.
• Maniac (1934): Don Maxwell, a fugitive actor who becomes a grave-robbing mad scientist's assistant, murders him, and then proceeds to murder more people to cover it up.
• The Manson Family follows the titular Family, a hippie cult trying to start a race war.
• The main character from Woody Allen's Match Point gets married to a rich woman mostly for her money while having an affair with his brother-in-law's girlfriend. Ultimately he gets the mistress pregnant, so to cover it up he kills her and her neighbor to make it look like a botched robbery.
• O-Dog in Menace II Society. Unlike some other examples of Villain Protagonists, he is not sympathetic or nice, has no redeeming qualities, and has very few traits of Affably Evil. Rather he is a sadistic Ax-Crazy who does not hesitate to kill.
• Mikey: The film is about a child serial killer who murders entire families that adopt him.
• Milady (2004) is a Perspective Flip retelling of The Three Musketeers, with the Musketeers' foe Milady de Winter as protagonist this time.
• The eponymous main character of Minis First Time is an utterly remorseless parricide. She is probably as close to soulless as a person could be, which is precisely what makes her so compelling to watch.
• Both the protagonists from Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), probably. Both were assassins, but there was really no clue as to just who their employers reported to or whether either organization was good or evil, or just what overall goals they had. (Jane did mention something to one target about "selling big guns to bad people" before she killed him, but there's no way of knowing if that was in any way typical of her hits.) Seeing as each of them seemed pretty decent to anyone who wasn't on his or her list, you might call them "Punch Clock Villain Protagonists".
• Money Train: Despite their sympathetic portrayal, the two main characters are still a pair of cops breaking the law for personal gain. They're not even ripping off some rich jerk (although the antagonist certainly acts the part), they're robbing a taxpayer-funded public agency.
• Earl Brooks of Mr. Brooks, a caring family man and philanthropist with a secret addiction to serial murder. Unlike a lot of examples, the good sides of his persona are real and not just a mask, making him highly sympathetic. Despite that, he's still a monster.
• Ms. 45: As sympathetic as she may be, Thana is still a mass murderer, and many of her victims are guilty of no more than being slightly obnoxious to her. By the end of the film, they are guilty only of being male.
• Natural Born Killers: The film follows Mickey and Mallory Knox, a Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple that murders multiple people across the country and becomes famous because of the media's fascination with their killing spree. Granted some of their victims did deserve it, but that doesn't justify their homicidal tendencies nor the fact that they killed some innocent people.
• Nicholas and Alexandra explores Tsar Nicholas II during his reign of the Russian Empire. While he does have moment of genuine kindness toward his own family, he is also shown to oppress and mistreat his own subjects, refuse to pass the reforms needed to improve their lives, and eventually drives them to the point where they revolt against him.
• Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler is a sociopathic video journalist who has no problem with worsening local crimes happening around him for the sake of the camera.
• Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a sociopathic hitman who is tasked to retrieve the stolen money from Llewelyn Moss. Out of the three main leads, he has more screentime than Moss and Bell.
• Not Okay: Danni is a monstrously selfish individual who takes advantage of a horrible tragedy for her own benefit, while trying desperately not to be exposed. She at least feels bad for what she's done, but it's made clear this won't get forgiven by most people.
• As The Antichrist Damien Thorn gets older in The Omen movies, he's upgraded to this status, specifically in Damien: Omen II and Omen III: The Final Conflict.
• Omerta: Omar Saeed Sheikh, the main character is a man willing to go to any lenghts to harm the countries that he perceives to be to oppressing his fellow muslims, not even sparing the ordinary citizens that are outside of their countries. The film is shown entirely from the perspective of the terrorists.
• Once Upon a Time in America: Max and Noodles.
• Once Upon a Time in the West: Played completely straight in Frank. Although Jill is arguably the film's protagonist, a lot of it is told through Frank's P.O.V., and it is ultimately his actions that set off the main storyline.
• The protagonist of One Foot in Hell is Mitch Barrett: a man who methodically and ruthlessly plans and carries out a campaign of robbery and murder to take vengeance on the men, and the town, he blames for his wife's death.
• Otis, which features a deranged serial killer who targets young women in order to relive his high school memories (or more accurately, his brother's). However, he apparently doesn't rape them.
• Outlaw: Gangster VIP: Goro Fujikawa, a Yakuza trying to get his gang back to the top of the heap.
• Daniel from Pain & Gain. The interesting thing is the survivors and family accused the filmmakers of portraying Lugo and his cohorts as "antiheroes who just made a few mistakes," which is about as far as the trailers got. In reality, the film doesn't make them out to be good people in the least, and instead shows that they are stupid, selfish people who torture and kill others for their money (Paul is an exception, who is a devout Christian dragged into this scheme, also being a combination of two other characters).
• The "father/daughter" con-artist team of Paper Moon.
• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille kills women in order to create the perfect perfume.
• Babs Johnson, the main character of Pink Flamingos. She's a serial killer, robber, thief among other things, but you just have to love her.
• Pistolera and Rico are career criminals who commit murder, assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and many other crimes: some as part of their Roaring Rampage of Revenge and some just for their own benefit.
• The Pit: Jamie Benjamin, a young outcast boy who feeds his tormentors to monsters in the woods.
• In the Based on a True Story film Point of Origin, the protagonist, fire investigator John Orr, is trying to find out a serial arsonist setting fires that end up killing four people. It is revealed to his former partner Keith Lang that Orr is the arsonist.
• Poor Albert & Little Annie: Albert Robertson, a violent misogynist who wants to kill his mother and falls in love with a child.
• The Producers (either version) is about two men who plot to defraud theatrical investors of millions of dollars with "creative accounting", the result of which is instead the Trope Namer for Springtime for Hitler. It is hinted that after they got their (much deserved) sentence, they intended to scam the police in prison with another theatrical play.
• The protagonist of The Prowler (1951), Webb Garland, is a police officer who has an affair with a married woman and then schemes to murder her husband.
• Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies: Shane Duncan (spoofing himself) feels no remorse for accidentally killing a man in the ring, and spends the entire film abandoning people to save himself.
• Psycho starts with a woman named Marion Crane who steals a huge amount of money in the spur of the moment and after hours of agonising about her choice ends up kilometers away from her home in a place called Bates Motel. There she meets Norman Bates and in an unusual twist he takes over as the protagonist for the rest of the story.
• In Purgatory, it looks like Blackjack and his gang of outlaws are going to be the protagonists of the movie, and the early scenes focus on them exclusively. However, this turns out to be a Decoy Protagonist once they arrive in Refuge.
• Archie Channing from Quigley started out as a Jerkass Corrupt Corporate Executive who was rather unforgiving to his employees, but after a car crash gets him sent to Heaven, he comes back to Earth in the form of a Pomeranian in order to make up for all of the selfish things that he did, which is what incites his Heel–Face Turn as the movie goes on.
• In The Raid 1945, Major Neal Benton and his men are escaped Confederate POWs who flee to Canada and then plan a raid across the border into St. Albans, Vermont, to rob its banks to replenish the Confederate treasury and burn buildings as revenge for Sherman's March to the Sea and to tie up the Union forces.
• Bill Wiliamson of Rampage is a trigger happy lunatic who goes on a killing spree, shooting up his home town and killing many people before skipping town with stolen money to start another rampage. In the sequel, he takes a studio hostage and later blows it up and kills everyone, before giving a little girl a gun and telling her to go home and kill her parents and herself. He claims he kills to strave off overpopulation and fight against the corrupt government, but his aditude toward his victims reveals this to be a shallow excuse.
• Reservoir Dogs follows several thieves after a heist. Although one of them is actually a cop, they are all more or less equal in screen time.
• The Australian psychological thriller Restraint has a female example in Teresa Palmer's character Dale, a stripper on a crime spree with her murderous boyfriend. She remains sympathetic due to a kind streak.
• Although he is fourth billed, psychopath Dublin O'Malley (played by Sean McClory) is actually the central character in Ring of Fear. And the first two credited stars weren't actors, but were famous for other things: Clyde Beatty as a Circus Owner/Lion Tamer and Mickey Spillane an author: both playing themselves.
• El Robo del Siglo: Fernando Araujo and the criminal crew that carried out the robbery of the Río de Acassuso Bank in 2006.
• In Saw X — after nine prior films where John Kramer, a.k.a. Jigsaw, led the franchise as an antagonist for various protagonists to try and thwart (and technically, spending over half of it dead) — Kramer himself becomes the de facto protagonist, following his point of view in between the first and second movies exacting revenge on a group of scammers who tried to offer him a fake treatment for his terminal cancer, one of whom turns out to be even more of a sadistic piece of work than he is.
• Scary or Die:
  • The Crossing has Buck, a racist Serial Killer who targets anyone he thinks is an illegal immigrant.
  • Re-Membered follows Detective Franks, a corrupt cop acting as an assassin.
• Shattered Glass follows Stephen Glass, a rising journalist who makes up half of what he writes.
• A Shock to the System follows an average joe (played by Michael Caine) who, after accidentally killing a homeless man, decides to also ingeniously murder his wife and boss, seduce his secretary, and get that job he's always wanted. And he gets away with it all, too.
• Shot Caller: Although he is a Punch-Clock Villain who only joined the group to survive in prison, Jacob is a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood and by the start of the film is so deeply involved in the organization that he can't leave it anymore.
• Sue Shiomi as Yumi Higaki from Sonny Chiba's Dragon Princess is a killing machine with violent revenge the one thing on her agenda. She also fits into the Type III Anti-Villain category and gets a Bittersweet Ending in that while she suffers the same fate as her father in avenging the loss of his arm, she survives and is able to live a more normal life.
• Starkweather is a Biopic that follows Spree Killer Charles Starkweather as he murders eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming between December 1957 and January 1958.
• The subtext of the Starship Troopers trilogy is that the humans are the evil invading aliens. On the surface, however, you're still supposed to be rooting for the humans.
• Star Wars:
  • Darth Vader himself, from the Star Wars franchise. According to George Lucas, the film franchise is fundamentally about Anakin and his progression from innocence to a force of good, his fall to evil, and subsequent redemption.
  • Kylo Ren from the Sequel Trilogy follows in his grandfather's footsteps, being at the very least co-protagonists with Rey and at the very most the true protagonist to Rey's Supporting Protagonist.
• Sidney Falco of Sweet Smell of Success. He screws over and uses everyone he meets in the film, with the exception of his master, J.J. Hunsecker (as portrayed by Burt Lancaster).
• Ryunosuke in The Sword of Doom is an amoral samurai whose cruelty earns him the hatred of almost everyone around him.
• The EC Comics adaptations Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror consist of story segments where each central character is a different kind of criminal and damned soul. No matter their age, no matter their background, no matter their social standing, all of their stories lead at the end of the day to death.
• Tales of Halloween:
  • "Trick": The main characters are revealed to be serial child torturers.
  • "This Means War": Boris iz a controlling, sexist prick who resorts to property damage, assault and murder-suicide over his neighbour's haunted attraction overshadowing his own.
  • "Friday the 31st": This segment follows an unnamed backwoods Serial Killer.
  • "The Ransom of Rusty Rex": Hank and Dutch are two bank robbers who have taken up kidnapping.
• Barry Champlain of Talk Radio is not a nice guy, no matter how you slice it. He's an emotionally abusive, short-tempered, and bitter Jerkass more concerned with getting rich of exposing America's seedy underbelly than actually fixing anything. He even freely admits to it in the climax.
  Barry: I should hang; I'm a hypocrite. I ask for sincerity, and I lie. I denounce the system as I embrace it. I want money and power and prestige: I want ratings and success. And I don't give a damn about you, or the world. That's the truth: for that I could say I'm sorry, but I won't. Why should I?
• Taxi Driver: Subverted in Travis Bickle. He's more of an Anti-Hero than plainly malicious.
• Nick Naylor of Thank You for Smoking is the "Sultan of Spin" and chief spokesperson for the tobacco industry. He testifies before a Congressional hearing that when his son, possibly the only other sympathetic character, turned eighteen and wanted a cigarette, he would buy him his first pack. The story softens his character considerably by making plain that he realizes the fact that many people see him as a villain, and good-naturedly takes this in stride.
• The Theatre Bizarre: The protagonist of "Vision Strains" is a writer/Serial Killer who cannot dream. She extracts fluid from her victims' eyes as they die and injects it into her own eye so she can experience the others' lives as they flash by in their dying moments.
• Thelma: Arguably against the author's will, who probably wanted to write a metaphor about old beliefs vs Christianity. But the result, oh dear... Everything here needs a spoiler, sorry.
  • When Thelma really, truly desires something, she can make that happen. What does she really desire?
    • To start with, when she is around six, to kill her newborn baby brother, who probably annoyed her with his crying here and there, in a gruesome way, and she makes him drown under an iced over lake.
    • Then to kill her father, who surely enough was repressive, but was like that only because he wanted to avoid seeing his daughter replicate what she did with her baby brother, and does so by burning him alive in the same lake where she killed her baby brother. And then makes a half-hearted try to find his body, giving up as soon as she remembers her hot lover (who she couldn't have, if she followed her father's decisions).
    • Of course, one could argue that most of the bad things happen when she is sleeping or without her knowing her powers, but, to start with, to truly want to kill your baby brother just because he annoys you is undoubtedly a mark of evil.
    • But, even more, we see the difference with what happens to Anja. Thelma kills her baby brother and her father, but "only" makes Anja disappear. Eventually Thelma can fix the last action, but is unable (or unwilling) to fix the others too. And she doesn't care to do it, either.
    • To put the cherry on the top, there is the chance that Thelma has (unconsciously) brainwashed the same Anja into loving her, and the movie ends with Thelma "calling back" Anja from where she was, and making out with her, without any remorse or worry about that possibility.
  • The only decent act Thelma does is to heal her mother.
• There Will Be Blood: Daniel Plainview is a malevolent oil baron who the audience only supports because he's at least somewhat ashamed of his own evil while his enemy is a holier-than-thou git who thinks he can do no wrong.
• Tragedy Girls: The titular girls, Sadie and McKayla, are unrepentant Serial Killers with no apparent redeeming qualities, apart from their genuine friendship with each other.
• Truth or Consequences, N.M. is about a low-level mobster named Raymond Lembecke who, after being released from prison, decides to rob a big-time drug dealer with his girlfriend and partners-in-crime. The remainder of the movie shows Ray and his friends on the run after the robbery is badly botched.
• Unfriended: Blaire turns out to have been the person who filmed and released the video which caused Laura to kill herself, and caused the whole mess in the first place. And rather than admit it and accept her fault, she tries to shift the blame on all her friends to try and save herself, showing that the "nice girl next door" thing is all a facade and she really is a cowardly, horrible little girl deep down.
• Alonzo the Armless is the central character in The Unknown. He is a murderous and obsessive knife-thrower who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake and has his arms amputated in an attempt to possess the woman he loves.
• The Usual Suspects revolves around a group of criminals, trying to get out from under the finger of the villain, Keyser Soze. It turns out that the protagonist, Verbal Kint, was the villain all along.
• Te Wheke, the rebel leader protagonist of Utu wants to kill every white person in New Zealand. These include the women and children, and any Maori who won't join his rebellion.
• Vampire's Kiss: Peter Loew starts as an abusive Bad Boss and cruel womanizer, before slowly going insane and becoming convinced he's a vampire. This culminates in him committing rape and murder.
• Cactus Jack Slade in the Western parody The Villain, though he's a thoroughly inept and bungling one.
• The Wild Angels: Heavenly Blues, a violent biker gang leader. While he's less ruthless than a lot of his comrades, he's still willing to assault preachers and cops, and employs a lot of Nazi imagery.
• The Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort.
• While her quirkiness does make her endearing at certain points, Mavis Gary from Young Adult spends most of the film doing everything she can to break up a happy, wholesome marriage (with a newborn girl, no less). Not to mention she is absolutely horrible and demeaning to most people who are unfortunate enough to come across her.
• The Young Poisoner's Handbook follows the rise and fall of Graham Young: a teenager obsessed with killing as many people with poison as he can.

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