Designated Villain / Film

• 28 Weeks Later tries hard to portray Dom as this. Leaving his wife to die, lying to his kids about what happened, and then grabbing the Idiot Ball and getting infected and causing a fresh breakout would put him in this bracket. However, the context of the setting and bad writing combine to ruin this:
  • Had his wife not given away the survivors' location at the start by letting in a child, there's a good chance they would have been fine, as Dom was unable to reach her due to an infected in the way and more coming, which made his survival instinct kick in right there. Not to mention he would have never reached his wife in time to prevent her from being bitten (she was on the second floor of a house, he outside) and attempting to do so meant fighting off no less than ten infected with his bare hands (it's established in the film fighting a single infected one-on-one unarmed is effectively a death sentence).
  • He doesn't exactly lie to his kids as he breaks down before getting to that part, not to mention he never actually sees what happened to her. Plus he is shown to be very guilt-ridden about the whole matter as it is. Yet his kids flat-out accuse him of lying about everything.
  • Speaking of which, he had every right to be furious about them leaving the safe zone. When you have the most deadly plague in history which has ravaged Britain in less than a month out there and the US Army enforcing the rules then you would be pissed, yet the film forgets that to focus on how him lying was so terrible and he is shown to struggle to find a response, making it seem like his kids have any moral high ground.
  • While he stupidly went and kisses his now-alive wife and got infected, why was she not being guarded? Plus, had he succeeded in killing his son while under the effects of the virus, then it's likely the rest of the world would have been fine.
  • There's also the US Army, who decide to just up and wipe out all civilians, infected or otherwise. Harsh? Yes. Necessary? Yes. It's the most deadly plague in human history, it spreads so unbelievably fast it's simply too deadly to try and tell if someone's infected or not (and if he is and he spots you, you have about two seconds before he's on you biting and vomiting infected blood in your face), and they've now learned people can be asymptomatic carriers. Any escaping survivor could spread the infection, which is exactly what happens when the protagonists spread it to France by escaping: Good job Sergeant Doyle, you saved two children but doomed (at least) all of Europe and Asia.
• Accepted: While he shows his true colors partway through the film, Hoyt Ambrose acts like a legitimately nice person for the first half of the movie, such as going out of his way to try to welcome the schubby-looking Sherman to their fraternity even when the other brothers are rudely ostracizing him. But Bartleby constantly insults him to his face with no provocation from the beginning, implicitly just because he's going out with the girl B has a crush on, and the audience is implicitly intended to sympathize with him long before it turns out Hoyt is a mean-spirited cheater.
• "Slaggy Lindsay" in Angus Thongs And Perfect Snogging. Sure, she's a bitch to Georgia, and doesn't seem particularly loveable, but it's kinda excused by the fact that Georgia is trying to steal her boyfriend throughout the film. To make matters worse, in the book series that the film is based on, she is known as "Wet Lindsay", and is basically despised by Georgia for being a wimp.
  • Lindsay only began to show signs of bitchiness after Georgia's constant attempts to steal her boyfriend become enormously apparent. In many ways, Georgia is a Designated Hero, blatantly insulting Lindsay throughout the film, treating her friends and parents horribly and using everyone as a means to an end to get with Robbie.
• Dean Wormer in the Animal House movie has every right to hate and put the Delta Fraternity on probation due to their disruptive antics, continuously poor academic standing, and flouting the school's rules. He also had reasons and authority to expel the members (plus he actually started plotting to expel them only after he was threatened into doing something about it).
• Amy Squirrel in Bad Teacher, thanks to her repeated, downright obsessive efforts to expose Elizabeth, the title character, for being Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Elizabeth is superficial, vain, lazy and mostly incompetent, a drug user, doesn't help her kids to learn (her success is achieved through cheating), she doesn't learn anything herself except perhaps to be slightly less superficial and jealously causes her to ruin Amy's life. She breaks multiple laws and rules and her only selfless acts are brief attempts to make some of her kids a little more cool. In short she is a terrible person and does almost nothing to justify the fact that the audience are supposed to root for her. Amy's methods are overbearing and underhanded, but it doesn't change the fact that she's absolutely right. Yet somehow, the audience is supposed to cheer for Elizabeth and see her wrecking Amy's life as a good and/or amusing thing.
• The villain of the 1996 made-for-TV horror movie The Beast is Schuyler Graves. He's the bad guy because: 1) He's richer than the hero, and 2) He has a less manly first name.
• Did anyone think that Faulkner in Bio-Dome was the bad guy? The stoner protagonists already screwed up his expensive experiment upon entering the dome, but he was willing to let them stay in the dome, getting free food and living in a paradise of an environment for a year rather than ejecting them and prosecuting them for trespassing. When the protagonists then proceeded to ruin every experiment he tried to conduct within the dome (including trying to rape two female scientists), he locked them off to stop them from ruining it even more. The only time in the film he does anything approaching Disproportionate Retribution is when he decides to blow the dome up, but considering that the protagonists had held, of all things, a massive party with hundreds of people in the dome, ruining an experiment that cost him billions... Yeah, the film is less "radical youths stick it to the Man" and more "man's life's work ruined by moronic pothead assholes."
• Bruce Almighty: Evan Baxter, whose only crime is legitimately getting the job Bruce wanted. Although that might be the point, given that Bruce is portrayed as a jerk at first. Maybe the creators realized this, which is why Evan is the protagonist of the sequel.
• C Me Dance: Satan. Sure, he's the Devil and all, but he doesn't do much that affects the plot. He is just there to jerk Sheri around a little bit and then gets called a loser.
• A Christmas Prince: Why exactly would Simon taking the throne be so bad? Especially since Richard is adopted and Emily can't inherit, meaning he's not even being a usurper. It's legally his! Not to mention that Richard for most of the movie shows no interest in taking the throne. The later movies even show that Simon legitimately cares for the kingdom as much as Richard, if not more.
• Christmas with the Kranks places the Kranks at the same level as the Grinch simply because they want to go on vacation for Christmas and don't want to partake in any of their neighborhood's usual celebrations.
• Clash of the Titans (1981): Medusa has never done anything wrong in her entire life, and just wants to be left alone in a place where no one could find her. That doesn't stop people from all over the world apparently hunting her down and trying to kill her to get her head, even though they have to enter the Underworld to do it.
• Clash of the Titans (2010): Medusa again, with a deeply tragic backstory. Io even seems to think she deserves pity. Of course, she's more of a means to an end to defeat the real villain, but still. Although here she's shown to be far more malevolent than her counterpart in the 80s version — where she appears to take great delight in killing the soldiers, and cackles whenever she successfully scares them.
• Jordan's father in the latter half of Cocktail is a villain purely because he won't let Brian and Jordan get back together. Brian being the same man who despite falling in love with Jordan immediately cheated on her with an older woman, and who didn't exactly have a positive reaction to the news that Jordan was pregnant with his child. Even though Mr. Mooney ended up disowning Jordan when she took Brian back, considering Brian's track record to that point his condemnation and derision of Brian was perfectly justified.
• Confessions of a Shopaholic: The debt collector, Derek, who is just doing his job and trying to get the main character to pay the bills she herself got. Even if he is a jerk, it doesn't change the fact that Becca goes on to owe tens of thousands of dollars due to her obsession with shopping and she has to pay for it. This is notably an adaptation-only case, as in the book, Becca acknowledges this happening and that Derek has devoted a lot of his and the bank's resources to get Becca to pay and gave her many chances to do so, for which she deeply apologizes and promises to start working off her debt.
• Amy's mother and aunt in Cuties, supposedly, for their traditional beliefs about women and their role in their culture. Even when they discover about Amy's out of control behavior and provocative wardrobe, their reactions weren't that unjustified since, in the mother's words, "You lied to me. You steal from me," which are things that Amy actually did. Granted, the mother's first response was to slap her but for the most part, she was panicking and sobbing while any other conservative Muslim family could've done much worse, especially in real life.
• Jillian in the Lifetime TV Movie Dear Santa is supposed to be seen as the bad guy because... she has a loving relationship with Derek. Her attempts at thwarting Crystal are completely justified because she has stalked Derek and tried to sabotage their relationship.
• The Devil Wears Prada tries to frame Christian as being a dick for knowing about the plan to replace Miranda and the whole thing as a Moral Event Horizon for the character. However, as some fans have pointed out, he is not wrong that Miranda is a horrible boss who needs to be replaced (as shown by the next scene where she backstabs her best friend to keep said job). The only genuinely "villainous" thing he does is kiss Andy while he knows she has a boyfriend, which ironically the movie blames Andy for.
• Even Tim Burton points out that the various producers in Ed Wood are all DVs; all they want to do is prevent Wood from making terrible movies on their dime.
• The Central Park Rangers in Elf, who are immediately evil because for some reason they look like the Nazgul despite being mounted police (though Santa eventually mentions that he put them on his naughty list once and they never forgave him).
• Expelled: Principal Gary Truman is shown to be completely justified in suspending and expelling Felix O'Neill because of his rule-breaking behavior, but is depicted as the antagonist only because Felix is the protagonist and is constantly framing himself in the right. Truman is strict, but mostly a Reasonable Authority Figure and he's clearly lost his patience with Felix because he can't get him to stop breaking the rules. It gets even worse when the movie has Felix discover Truman is embezzling the school's money in order to pay his gambling debts. The writers had to make him a criminal because they couldn't make him unlikable or wrong any other way.
• From the standpoint of the protagonists in Fast Five, Hernan Reyes is this. While he's a drug dealer and murderer to be sure, they only ran afoul of him because he'd hired them to steal some cars and they broke the deal because they realized his people were only really interested in one of the cars which turned out to have important information regarding his business. They really had no reason to do this as they were just hired to steal the cars. This ultimately results in a high speed chase dragging a ten ton vault through the streets of Rio where the "heroes" cause untold damage. The police in the film are absolutely this unless we are to believe EVERY SINGLE cop in Rio is on the drug dealer's payroll, and even then they would have every valid reason in the world to stop the group of street-racing assholes who were speeding down the street, dragging a freaking massive safe, destroying buildings and parked vehicles and everything they pass by and endangering the lives of the innocent citizens of Rio every step of the way for no reason other than some cash and to spite Hernan Reyes for sort-of-but-not-really lying to them.
• The New York district attorney Sean Kierney in Find Me Guilty. Throughout the film, Kierney is the rival to Designated Hero Jackie DiNorscio. Despite coming off as something of a Jerkass, at no point in the film is Kierney wrong about his reasons as to why Jackie and his associates deserve to be convicted. However, the film goes out of its way to portray Jackie as the blameless hero (who at best will try to explain his flaws with half-assed reasoning) and Kierney is presented as a crusading zealot out to enforce the claimed "government oppression" of Italian-Americans. He ends up being a borderline Straw Character for how easily Jackie outmaneuvers him. Granted, this was based on historical events, but even still, the movie is clearly not on his side when he's one of the few characters in the movies who's simply looking for justice.
• The First Wives Club: Phoebe, Bill's mistress. Unlike the other mistresses, she didn't have any ill will towards Elise and genuinely idolized her, even coming to her career-resurrecting play to enthusiastically cheer her on.
• Flight of the Navigator: Dr. Faraday fills the only real antagonistic role in the film, but isn't necessarily a bad guy so much as a beleaguered bureaucrat who's trying to juggle a very awkward workload. Even though NASA is essentially holding David against his will while they study him, the Doctor still makes some effort to ensure David is kept content while he's in their custody (though not enough effort, obviously) and does show concern for his safety once the boy ends up commandeering the drone ship. Even his "mooks" are a bunch of pleasant chaps who settle in with the Freemans to watch The Price is Right while staking out their house.
  • When Max shuts down to teach David a lesson, the ship starts falling out of the sky. Dr. Faraday immediately asks, "Did somebody *shoot* him down??" He is concerned for David's welfare. But as every child knows, being concerned for the child's welfare is different from having their best interests at heart.
• The Fly (1958): The spider gets crushed to death for the mortal sin of being a carnivore. Or perhaps merely because it was next to Andre-fly which freaked out the inspector to the point of feeling it necessary to kill both.
• Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistlestop Cafe: Not a villain per se, but Evelyn's husband is portrayed in a very negative way. Throughout the movie, the audience never sees nor hears of him doing anything bad to her or anyone else. He's not very exciting and clearly has interests that don't involve her, but he doesn't try to suppress her new-found spirit either. When it is inconvenient for him, he gets annoyed, but never says anything mean or regrettable. The only time he ever draws the line is when she wants to move Ninny in with them—something he only finds out about when he discovers Evelyn preparing a room for her. He attempts to reason that Ninny is both very old and not even family. Since Evelyn has only known Ninny for a short time, has only visited her in a facility where she receives 24/7 care, and that despite her age, Ninny is otherwise in good health and could live for several more years (not to mention the inevitable issues that will arise when they must make end-of-life decisions for a non-related adult living under their roof), Ed definitely has a point.
  • Ed's chief "villainy" is not that he does anything bad to Evelyn, or that he tries to prevent her from doing what she wants. It's more that he seems blind to his wife's growing unhappiness. In fairness to Ed, Evelyn believes that she is at fault and doesn't express her concerns to Ed until she's well past despair (the film plays this for laughs while the novel shows her frequently fantasizing about suicide), but once she does so, Ed seems responsive to the idea.
    • There's also a little difference in the film (where Evelyn's personal growth is the main focus) and the novel (where we have a little more time to see how their marriage is going). By the end of the film, Ed's just warming up to his wife's new ideas; in the book, he comes around a little earlier and the book ends with indications that their relationship is in the midst of a happy upswing. Plus, there's something to be said about a man who visits his belligerent elderly aunt in a nursing home every week, even when he knows she's just going to throw things at him.
• Dan Sanders in Furry Vengeance is a Nice Guy who just happens to work for a company that wants to tear down the forest. However, because he works for the company, even though he has no real power in whether or not the forest will be destroyed (as he's pretty much just the land developer and, therefore, the middle man), we are supposed to be delighted when the animals beat him up.
• The bodybuilding documentary Generation Iron does this with the multiple time Mr. Olympia champion, Phil "The Gift" Heath. All his edited interview clips make him come off as stuck up and arrogant, in contrast to his rival Kai Greene, who is shown as humble, philosophical, and the underdog. This was done intentionally to add some drama to what would otherwise be a standard bodybuilding film.
• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: Godzilla, of all characters, manages to be this. The Godzilla of this film is one of the less violent incarnations of the character, who only attacks Japan because he was attracted to a nuclear power plant and later plasma energy. When Godzilla attacks Japan again, it is revealed to have been because some humans were conducting tests with plasma energy, ignoring how such technology is illegal and capable of attracting him. While Godzilla is certainly dangerous, his actions do not justify the extreme lengths the humans go to kill him including building a black hole weapon. Furthermore, in trying to kill Godzilla using said black hole weapon, the humans wound up bringing film's other titular monster, which was only stopped by Godzilla himself.
• Gold Through the Fire: The school biology teacher is portrayed as bad just for saying to Peter that, while he may disagree with evolution, it's what they teach (as this is the scientific consensus) and he isn't allowed to disrupt things, nor later write his objections rather than the actual answers in a paper.
• The Hannah Montana movie's villain was a land-developer who wanted to pave an empty field to build a mall. Todd in the Shadows pointed out that a mall would actually have greatly boosted the economy of the town, attracted more people (such as tourists or prospective home-buyers, which would have also improved economy) and that the guy wants to pave an empty field that has no real use. Yet the audience is expected to root against him just because he's a land developer in a family movie.
• Hanuman vs. 7 Ultraman: The kaiju were merely awakened by scientists' attempts to launch artificial rain and went on a rampage due to being disturbed, yet they are brutally ganged on by Hanuman and the Ultra Brothers and suffer graphic deaths, with nary a reference to them being Non-Malicious Monsters like more sympathetic entries of the Ultra Series would make.
• The Haunting Hour: Priscilla doesn't really do anything except make some catty remarks to Cassie about her fashion sense, and Cassie retaliates by inflicting Disproportionate Retribution on her. Yet apparently we're supposed to find this acceptable, but not feel the same toward Priscilla's attempted revenge.
• Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House: Natalie. Despite supposedly being some kind of Rich Bitch Wicked Stepmother, she is nothing but kind to Kevin until he ruins her engagement party ^note  He was trying to stop some burglars, however, considering no one else saw anything and he provides no evidence, you can't really blame her for being skeptical and gives her reason to suspect he is trying to sabotage her relationship with Peter. She is even nice to Kate when she comes to visit, the only bad thing she's alleged to have done is overwork Prescott, which we never even get to see, as such the ending (Peter breaks up with her on Christmas Eve and she bursts into tears in front of everyone, who seem to be happy about it) comes across as extremely mean spirited.
• However, Home Sweet Home Alone might be even worse regarding the supposed bad guys, specially when they end up getting more audience sympathy than the protagonist: Jeff and Pam are in desperate financial straits and only want to get back a valuable family heirloom from a Spoiled Brat rich kid who does very little to endear himself to the audience. About their only "villainous" trait is jumping to the conclusion that Max stole the doll, which he actually didn't. It's quite telling that the movie feels the need to contrive a "Fawlty Towers" Plot so that Max thinks they're trying to kidnap him, just so he won't look like a complete asshole for putting them through the franchise's typical slapstick misery.
• The Hunt for Red October: The "villains" of this film are all patriotic Soviet citizens, who are either told the truth and desperately trying to prevent their top submarine captain from defecting to their arch-enemy with a state-of-the-art submarine carrying a non-trivial portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, or have been led to believe that said captain has gone rogue and intends to kick off World War III and are equally desperately trying to stop that from happening.
• In a World…...: Gustave (Ken Marino) is a sexist jerk with an entitlement complex, but he never actually does anything underhanded or immoral. His "crimes" are limited to taking up some of Lake Bell's father's attention, having consensual sex with her at a party, submitting an audition for a part they both want, and being a Sore Loser afterward.
• Jem and the Holograms (2015) has Erica Raymond. The worst thing she does is to try to get Jem to become a solo act, which is something Jerrica could easily just say no to. She's treated as a Corrupt Corporate Executive because she produces "no talent auto-tune pop acts", rather than musicians with depth, but she's nonetheless competent and successful at her job. Also, we never get to see any of the damage she does to the music industry. This is especially true when her counterpart in the original series was a genuinely horrible person who endangered the heroes' lives.
• Keith in La La Land is a Jazz musician who understands that the traditional form of the genre is no longer as popular as it used to be, and to "save" the genre, he must adapt to what younger people are listening to. He creates a successful Jazz Fusion band that rides to great success and at least one arena-packing tour. Too bad he isn't the hero of the story. Sebastian, who is a Jazz traditionalist, doesn't want to change anything and thinks anyone doing so is a sellout and a traitor. Keith is shown as a nice guy and just as passionate about the genre as Sebastian, but the film makes it seem like he is in the wrong for wanting to change a genre from what it used to be, despite Jazz itself being a form of music that was created as something new and non-traditional and something that evolved over time, never staying the same. It doesn't help that the audience is supposed to side with Sebastian in this, despite the fact that Keith offers him steady employment (an offer Sebastian happily grabs after being fired from several previous gigs), and the money Sebastian makes from the tours and chart success enables him to lease and open a jazz club that is operating several years after the main events of the film, proving that even if Keith wanted to change the genre into "something it's not", there's still a market for traditional Jazz, particularly in a hotly-contested market like Los Angeles.
• Little Giants: Zigzagged with Kevin O'Shea. The crux of the film is that he cut one of the most skilled players to try out for the team on the grounds that she's a girl, and he otherwise turned down numerous other kids who were just not cut out for football. Aside from rejecting Becky, Kevin's actions are perfectly understandable, sorry to say for the kids. We otherwise see that he's a good coach who cares for his players, won't stoop to cheating to win, and loves his family including his brother and niece who are against him. At worst, he's a Villainy-Free Villain who just acts like a Jerkass on occasion, but considering his genuinely impressive career, who can blame him for not taking it well when his little brother forms a rival team?
• Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: Aside from having some stringent laws, Aunty Entity and the residents of Bartertown aren't all that evil. Master and Blaster, despite nearly killing Max several times, are only doing what they feel is necessary for them to survive.
• Caroline in Maid in Manhattan, one of the two "wicked stepsisters" in this modern-day version of Cinderella. She's a flake and utterly oblivious to the fact that the "Prince" is completely uninterested in her, but other than that, she doesn't do anything wrong. The one remotely bad thing that she does is file a complaint when she discovers that Marisa (the titular maid) has been wearing her clothes and pretending to be her—a perfectly legitimate gripe.
• Dr. Jarret in Man's Best Friend is an interesting case of this. He is performing unethical and illegal research on animals (bad) and he created the genetically engineered killer dog that causes all the trouble in the movie (also bad, but keep reading). His purpose was to build the ultimate guard dog after his wife and child were killed; he figured it would be a good product to sell. He also kept Max on a strict regiment of drugs designed to keep him from going berserk and insane. When the Designated Hero steals Max from the laboratory, the police and others don't seem too interested in taking Dr. Jarret seriously, despite the fact that he has explained that his dog is a ticking time bomb that's ready to explode in a shower of mayhem...He made the monster, but he kept it under control, and it was only due to the acts of others that it escaped and was able to kill people. And we're supposed to believe that he's bad.
• Mean Girls: Karen barely even qualifies as a villain, and is really only depicted that way since she's one of the Plastics. And given how unbelievably stupid she is, it's hard to tell if she even had an understanding that she's associated with bad people.
• The disaster film Meteor had an American general be portrayed in a bad light for objecting to Russians getting access to a top-secret American command center during the height of the Cold War. Straw Man Has A Point.
• Rail Chief Patterson in Money Train is the bad guy because... he doesn't want his trains robbed by the protagonists. Granted, he's not exactly likable, being a greedy Mean Boss and a Control Freak with little to no empathy for others (and for the cherry on top he also directs some low key racism first at a black officer working for him and later a Hispanic officer too), but when the "good guys" are cops going rogue and whose motivation is to pay off gambling debts one of them owes to the criminal underworld (and one of them was semi-seriously planning the heist when paying off the debt was not nearly as much of an issue as it later became), it's hard to say they're any better when it comes to greed, at least. This is downplayed example, however, because Patterson does undeniably go Jumping Off the Slippery Slope by endangering the lives of dozens of innocents as part of his attempt to stop the robbery, and both the film and characters react to it as a major escalation from simply being a petty Jerkass to an actual villain, but that's also something which movies, particularly of that era, often tend to shrug off or excuse whenever a main character does it. It's been observed on a number of occasions that leaving out a few unsympathetic moments might be enough to turn Patterson from the bad guy to a fairly typical hardass movie cop trying to stop criminals.
• Discussed in Monkey Bone by Death who is fed up with people treating her like the bad guy when she's just trying to do her job, which must be done, all the while people are breaking into the Land of the Dead to steal "exit passes" and cheat death. She's right too: while she has a literally explosive temper, she's a charmingly likeable person (Being played by Whoopi Goldberg cemented that), a Benevolent Boss, and even a Reasonable Authority Figure willing to bend her own rules sometimes and let people return to Earth.
  Death: Look. I'm a simple person. I do an honest day's work. Why does everybody make that so hard for me? You're switching bodies, you're stealing exit passes, I work a long enough day as it is!
• Stuart in Mrs. Doubtfire is guilty of nothing more than dating Miranda and building a relationship with her children. Daniel hates him for stealing his family's affections, even though Stuart wasn't even in the picture until after the divorce and custody hearing. At the end (having inadvertently nearly killed Stuart), Daniel seems to realize that he was blaming the wrong person, and they manage to work out a reasonable co-parenting arrangement.
• The Music Man: Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman who hates Hill and wants to expose him as a fraud. He's a little sleazy, hitting on Marian, and even when he tries to help people it's for selfish reasons and he acts like an ass while doing so. But he ends the play having probably lost his job and watching Harold Hill get away with everything.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend: Professor Bedlam, before he makes a Heel–Face Turn at the end. He is stated to be a Super Villain and G-Girl's Arch-Enemy, but despite this we never see him commit any crime nor fight G-Girl for most of the movie. His only "villainous" acts were to de-power G-Girl, who by this point has been established as a terrible superhero and a Psycho Ex-Girlfriend, along with hanging Matt from the Statue of Liberty (though he knew she'd save him easily).
• The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia: Bastian's stepsister may be a witch, but she actually does something with the power she obtains, and while what she does with it is selfish, Bastian's calling her out for screwing things up falls flat since he could have avoided it all by actually doing something with it himself when he had the chance. Also, she's part of why he wins the final fight, by using the book to give him super kung-fu moves. While he's still got the amulet and still isn't using it.
• A Night at the Opera: Lasspari is at least unpleasant enough that the audience wants to see him eat humble pie, but Gottleib is never portrayed as anything but a decent man looking out for his opera and his investors. Sure, he doesn't like Driftwood, thinking him a cheat, a hustler, and a fortune hunter... but Driftwood is all of those things, and he has no particular grudge against Tomasso and Fiorello until they break into his business and start ruining his show and repeatedly injuring his head. On the other side, Gottleib was absolutely ok with helping Lasspari ruin Rosa's career because she rejected his advances and only gave Ricardo a chance when he was literally his only hope.
• Night of the Blood Beast: There's no clear reason why the alien is treated as evil at the end. The protagonists even acknowledge this... after they've murdered the poor thing.
• Mrs. Spicer is seen as the bad guy in No Kidding purely for wanting a home for underprivileged children and not wanting the children of Chartham Place to run free unsupervised. Sure, she is trying to take Chartham Place away from the Robinsons, but it is safe to say her idea would be a much more deserving use of the ground than as a place for rich brats to stay on holiday for large sums of cash. David's confession that he spent time in an underprivileged children's home as a child and had an awful time does complicate things, however.
• Now You See Me: Thaddeus Bradley did nothing illegal and nothing more immoral than expose Lionel Shrike's magic tricks. Of all the people responsible for Shrike's death and his family never receiving the life insurance they were owed, he's arguably the least responsible, yet undeniably gets punished the worst for it.
  • The reason might be connection. While Lionel's death was the result of a faulty safe and insurance trickery meant not a lot of money, the only reason he was placed in that situation was because Bradley ruined him. His motive seems to be nothing more than bitterness.
  • If anything, the safe company was the least at fault. Holding them responsible for the fact that a man who, of his own free will, locked himself in one of their safes and then had said safe submerged deep underwater, and then died, is fairly absurd. If anything, the fact that Shrike was unable to escape from the safe is testament to the fact that the safe was well-made and functioned as intended.
  • Also, the insurance company can hardly be faulted for refusing to pay out for the death of a man whose reckless actions directly caused it. Being a magician doesn't absolve one from responsibility..
  • On top of all that, this designation is later subverted in the sequel where it's revealed that, like Dylan in the first movie, Bradley was really part of the mysterious Eye organization all along, with his rivalry with Lionel Shrike being all a ruse to keep up appearances when they were really partners the whole time. So it turns out Dylan's beef with him was entirely pointless.
• Sgt. Doberman from the 1970s love letter to anarchy, Over the Edge. His shooting of a teenager in the film is considered a Moral Event Horizon - and subsequently, his murder by anonymous teenagers is presented as a good thing - ignoring that the stupid kid was pointing a gun at him and screaming "Die, pig!!"^note In case you're confused, pointing anything that even LOOKS like a gun at a cop is granting him permission to blow your head off. And that isn't some new policy of theirs; it's always been that way. In fact, even a regular civilian would be justified in using lethal force against that assailant in that scenario, as using lethal force in self-defense is legally justified to protect yourself from imminent death or grievous injury Doberman tries to defend himself by saying that he didn't know the gun wasn't loaded (and, in fact, his life depended on not making such an idiotic assumption), but the movie plainly doesn't care about that very salient point and drops it rather quickly. '70s audiences no doubt were horrified, but modern audiences might instead feel relieved that the Sergeant took this moron out before he could get the chance to breed.
• The Parent Trap (1961): While Vicki may be an unsympathetic character, at the same time she is only viewed as a "villain" by the girls, simply because she gets in the way of their plan to reunite their parents. Plus, she really didn't deserve the last prank the girls pulled on her (by covering her feet in honey), which really could have killed her — which makes her understandably furious. And while much is made of Vicki being a gold digger, no one ever seems to call out Mitch for being a much older man marrying a younger woman, or for failing to mention to the woman he intends to marry that he was previously married and has another daughter; Vicki is justifiably not pleased when she finds out the truth. On the other hand, the film does establish early on that she only wants to marry Mitch for his money and she remarks to her own mother about her plans to ship Sharon and Susan off to boarding school.
• In Patch Adams, anyone who expects Adams to conform is an antagonist, especially Dean Wilcott. Adams's nonconformity includes practicing medicine without a license, stealing from a hospital, and ignoring background history. The audience is expected to side with Adams on all issues, but most audiences think that the Strawman Has a Point. Adams' roommate is treated as a villain who needs to change because he's annoyed by Adams and thinks that he cheats on his exams. However, the character is simply an earnest medical student who has good reason to be suspicious of Adams' flawless grades, given the fact that we never see him study. Even the Real Life Patch Adams, who behaves nothing like his fictional counterpart, hates the movie and sides with the "villains."
• The Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1962), who is in that version entirely a victim despite posters and plot synopses calling him "the figure of terror incarnate" seeking his "hellish revenge". He doesn't even kill anyone or actively seek any sort of retribution (which many viewers would likely actually see as justified) against the evil man who was the cause of all his suffering, Lord Ambrose d'Arcy.
• Project X (2012): Rob the neighbor is regarded as a big party pooper who just doesn't want the partygoers to have any fun, but he didn't even ask them to shut down the party until nearly midnight, and he wants the party to end because the noise is keeping his wife and child awake. Despite his good reasons, though, the movie keeps treating him as if he wronged the kids, and he ends up getting tased, stalked, tackled, and nearly gets his house set on fire for his troubles.
• The A.I. from Resident Evil (2002). It was supposed to be seen as wrong for insisting that the main characters kill one of their own who was infected before the A.I. would let them leave and for killing everyone in the facility when the virus was released. The problem with this? It was the only one doing its job. Everyone else was too busy trying to force their way in and then out, short-circuiting the A.I. or sending in more and more people into what should be a building under total quarantine. If they had just let the A.I. do its job they wouldn't be dealing with a worldwide zombie apocalypse two movies later. The Red Queen becomes much more antagonistic during her return in Resident Evil: Retribution, in which she's running a facility cloning Alice and several of the movie series characters by the hundreds and killing them over and over again in order to try and control Umbrella's viruses.
• The Santa Clause: The cops later in the first film are treated as trying to ruin Christmas by arresting Scott, who is now Santa, but from their perspective, they're just holding a delusional man who kidnapped a young boy and committed breaking and entering.
• School of Rock depicts Ned's girlfriend Patty as being pushy and hypocritical because she "forces" him to demand Dewey actually get a job and pay his massive rent debt. Even though this is a rather reasonable demand since Dewey isn't terribly concerned with what a drag he is on Ned. She is also supposed to be seen as hypocritical by pointing out that Dewey steps all over him and manipulates him...even though he does exactly that to Ned, to the point of engaging in identity theft to get a job under his name and trying to beg that he not do anything about it when Ned finds out. She's later further villainized for convincing Ned to press charges over the identity theft. At no point in the film is Dewey ever truly sorry for what he pulls on Ned and how many laws he broke or even that what he did could seriously impact Ned's own career as a teacher. For starters, the income from the job that Ned technically lost out on since Dewey took it from him, or what would happen when Ned didn't declare income from a job unknowingly taken under his name on his taxes. Dewey does acknowledge that what he did to the kids was wrong, but he's not ever aware of how much he took advantage of his roommate either. The moment where Ned breaks up with Patty for Dewey's concert is supposed to be a triumph of assertiveness when her only crime is being kind of aggressive over Ned not ever standing up for himself and being taken advantage of.
• The Shape of Water: During the Asset's breakout, Giles is caught and nearly arrested by a security guard. However, Dr. Hoffstetler arrives at the last minute and gives the guard a lethal injection. The scene is played up as a Big Damn Hero moment. Never mind the fact that the victim was an ordinary security guard who was Just Following Orders. Could also be seen as a case of Protagonist-Centered Morality. Then again, Giles himself was horrified at this action, it could be said to be a necessary evil in order to save the Asset, and presumably everyone else, and Hoffstetler is a bit of an Anti-Hero.
• Sleepless in Seattle: Victoria. Her laugh is annoying as hell, yes, but other than that, she seems like a perfectly nice person.
• The Gorgonites in Small Soldiers is actually a Justified Trope In-Universe. The Gorgonites were originally meant for an environmental-friendly toyline, but it was cancelled and folded into the Commando Elite as the bad guys. However, their creator was angry at that and, instead of turning the Gorgonites into the enemy, their friendly nature was left in. Thus, the supposed-to-be heroic Commando Elite turn into genocidal monsters because they are "the good guys" (and because their bumbling creator accidentally outfitted them with CPUs from guided missiles) and the Gorgonites are "the bad guys".
• Most of the men in The Smokers are this, particularly David. He's considered bad because he's hot and cold towards Lisa, despite the fact that he knew her for less then an hour before they had sex and that Lisa never hinted that she'd like to go out with him instead of just having a one-night stand. Hell, he isn't even depicted as being a jerkass for most of the movie, but not only does the film tell us we're supposed to hate him, it expects us to laugh when he's being raped and tortured by our "heroes".
• In the Nickelodeon flick Snow Day; the "villain" is simply the town snowplow driver, referred to exclusively as "Snowplow Man". It's more or less Played for Laughs, as obviously, from the perspective of a kid, the guy who clears away the snow and enables more school days after a blizzard must be a heinous villain, even though this is obviously not the sole reason or consequence for clearing away the snow. Then we actually see the guy in action and it turns out The Cuckoolander Was Right, and he does take pleasure in sending the kids back to school For the Evulz.
• Space Mutiny. Seriously, all the "mutineers" wanted was just to go home instead of being forced to spend the rest of their lives on a derelict spaceship just because of some ridiculous, bullshit law the ship's captain made decades ago. Kalgan doesn't even start using underhanded tactics until after Ryder starts slaughtering his men unprovoked. This is doubly egregious since the opening blurb about the colony ship is that they're looking for a new planet to settle. The mutineers have found a planet to settle and are going to fulfill the ship's mission by settling there. A scene cut from the better known Mystery Science Theater version establishes that their leaders are planning to sell the ship's crew into slavery, with the rank and file being duped into it.
• Zander Barcalow in Starship Troopers. He's supposed to be seen as the bad guy because he keeps trying to "steal" Johnny Rico's girl Carmen throughout the movie. However, he's completely upfront about his interest in her. When they fight in the mess hall, he keeps his word about disregarding rank (he's an officer fighting with an enlisted man), he could have easily had Johnny imprisoned, thrown out of the Mobile Infantry, or even (going by book canon and/or the third movie) executed. He risks his own ass to come out and give the Roughnecks covering fire when they are evacuating Planet P when he could have sat in his cockpit, safe and sound. He was an honorable man and a brave soldier. It also doesn't help that whilst Rico is actively trying to fight off the affections of Dizzy, the same simply cannot be said about Carmen when it comes to Zander (at least by what we see on-screen). It's hard to put all of the fault at his door for trying to steal away another man's girlfriend when she comes across as wanting to be stolen.
• The NTSB in Sully, to the point that the organization complained about their portrayal in the film. Even with as much as Clint Eastwood tries to paint them as the mean bureaucrats who want to pin sole responsibility for the crash on The Everyman Sully and his co-pilot, the NTSB is just doing the job they exist to do; to investigate accidents and determine if the cause was human error or otherwise.
• Mrs. Tingle in Teaching Mrs. Tingle is really the only sensible and likable character. Most of the movie involves the jerkass protagonist and her friends trying to torture and murder her because she accused the protagonist of cheating when she had every reason to believe that the protagonist had, in fact, been cheating. She only has one Kick the Dog moment when she tells the protagonist that she's destined to stay stuck in their small town forever and become an alcoholic like her mother, but again, that's after the protagonist broke into her house and assaulted her. The movie also heavily implies that Trudy, the protagonist's competitor for the stipendium, deserves to be killed merely for being studious.
• Thunderbirds Are Go: The poor snake aliens only open fire on the Martian explorers after they inadvertently blow one of their own to smithereens.
• The Time Travelers: Willard is treated as a villain for pointing out that the rocket built to save the last of humanity has no room for four more passengers and that there's no time to add more room or rebuild the time window so that the scientists (and electrician) can go home.
• In the "Kick the Can" segment of the Twilight Zone: The Movie, the apparent villain is a man whose only concern is for the welfare of a bunch of octogenarians who shouldn't be engaging in physically strenuous activity. How's he supposed to know that it's really magic at work that will keep them safe? The man, Mr. Conroy, is crushed to find that the magic was real and he missed the chance to be young again (but right at the end, Mr. Bloom promises us that he'll get the magic after all).
• Twister:
  • Jonas and his "evil, tornado-chaser crew". Jonas used to be a "pure" tornado chaser, then he got corporate sponsors and a fleet of black SUVs. He also has a duplicate of the main characters' "Dorothy" system, which he rightly claims credit for building. Bill (a guy who had given up tornado chasing to get a job as a TV weatherman) even assaults Jonas while he's talking to reporters, and gets angry when Jonas snidely asks how his new gig is going. This motivates Bill to abandon his fiancee and team up with his ex-wife and her crew. Bill also looks down on Jonas because he relies on technology and not instinct in order to predict tornadoes. So, if you can't sense the weather like Bill, you're a fraud, because, apparently, the whole point of tornado chasing isn't scientific research... And at the end, Jonas gets killed by a tornado. Um...yay?
  • This is made even worse because Bill and Jonas have the exact same goal - using the Dorothy system to gain valuable scientific data that could lead to better tornado warning systems that could save lives. Not only that, Jonas does not once use evil means to achieve these ends. There's no difference between Bill and Jonas ... except that Jonas is just a bit mean to Bill, whereas Bill is actively violent and abusive to Jonas.
• In Unaccompanied Minors, the bad guy is the airport security director. He's upset that he can't go on vacation because the whole airport is snowed in. The protagonists are all kept away in a children's area, but the main characters break out and proceed to steal food, steal a transport, and go to the mileage club without being accompanied by an adult. He confines them to the airport room while the rest of the kids are taken to an inn. For the rest of the film, they break out, steal from the unclaimed baggage, and try to get to that inn where one of the character's sister is. The director's just doing his job in trying to get them back. He proceeds to fall over a slop, crash a canoe, and an annoyed guest assaults him, along with the girl who stole the car! At the end of the film, this is addressed, as he just tells the main kid that he's just doing his job. However, the movie still treats him as a scrooge for being bitter on Christmas, and it's he who learns the lesson about giving, while the protagonists don't get called on their actions.
• Davey Bunting in Unforgiven. He's a good-natured cowboy who never hurts anyone in the film, and when his partner Quick Mike (who definitely IS evil) maims Delilah, Davey tries to compensate her by giving her a pony. But because he's partnered with Quick Mike, his offer is rejected with rocks and sticks, a bounty is placed on his head along with Quick Mike, and he is brutally killed by Will Munny, the main protagonist.
• Laura Barnes in Unfriended. The entire movie is about her coming back from the dead as a ghost to torment and kill her former classmates via Skype because they drove her to suicide via, not only an embarrassing video they filmed of her passed out drunk after a party, but also by cyberbullying her through anonymous videos and harsh Facebook posts telling her to kill herself. While one of the teens tries to justify these actions by saying Laura was allegedly a bully in school, the fact that we never learn much about her as a character at all from before her death put this claim into question and it thus could easily be assumed that they drove Laura to suicide because they were jealous of her popularity and maybe wanted the spotlight for themselves (as it would make more sense than a baseless bullying accusation).
• Walt Ferris, the inspector, from We Bought a Zoo. The most 'evil' thing he does is give a surprise, unofficial inspection a few weeks early... allowing the family to fix the problems he points out, so they can pass the REAL inspection (he also warns them of an impending regulation change, something he didn't really have to do; they treat this as a dick move, for some reason, as if he's the one changing the regulation). He is stated to have stolen some of their innovations for himself, but there's no actual evidence of that. In fact, he acts downright civil towards his supposed enemy, as long as the latter doesn't try to kill him.
• With Honors: Pitkannen seems like this with Monty as his dragon. Though he is condescending and dismissive, especially towards Simon, Pitkannen was never really outright antagonistic towards any of the main characters apart from maybe deciding to withhold Monty's honors status on graduation after the alterations made to his thesis. So he isn't really a "villain", so much as he's merely just a Jerkass.
  • It's not even that Pitkannen is a jerkass. Monty didn't graduate "with honors" due to turning in his thesis later than required for honors status. He could have gotten it finished, but chose to go with Simon to meet the latter's son instead of finishing the thesis, which was just completing the bibliography.
• The Wizard: The villain of this movie is literally the finder of lost children. The protagonists think he's sick because he gets paid for it. Putnam is a Jerkass, but he was just doing his job. However, Putnam does actively attempt to stop the father of the boys from finding him first by slashing his tires and later bribing a tow truck driver into towing the dad's truck which results in it getting stripped just so Putnam can get the reward money, so he's not exactly innocent.
• Inspector Aberline from The Wolfman (2010) is really only an antagonist so far as he's trying to kill the hero. Sir John is the actual villain of the story.

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