Evil Is Petty / Live-Action Films

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• American History X: Seth is a fat Neo-Nazi who's also a Big Eater. In one of the most pointlessly petty acts of racism possible, he eats a scale full of white jellybeans but picks out a single black one first. There's no one else in the room so he's not trying to impress any of his Nazi friends, it's not directed against a member of any race he hates, he rejects a piece of candy that no one will know about simply because he's a racist.
• American Ultra: During the operation to kill Mike and Lasseter, Yates quarantines the town and feeds the news channels a cover story about the two of them carrying an infectious disease. However, he also takes the opportunity to humiliate Lasseter, his rival at the CIA, by claiming that she contracted the disease through inappropriate contact with infected monkeys.
• In Antebellum, Elizabeth messes up Veronica's hotel suite for no reason other than to mess with her mind. This includes leaving strands of her hair in Veronica's bed, stealing Veronica's lipstick, and using the toilet and not flushing.
• In the final chapter of The Batman (Serial), the villain has Batman tied up in a chair and brings out Batman's girlfriend Linda and her uncle, who are under the influence of his mind control. Could he be about to threaten Linda’s life in some fiendishly clever way in order to put Batman through exquisite psychological torture? Well, actually, he just makes Linda slap Batman in the face. And then laughs at them. Don't worry, he gets eaten by alligators.
• Batman Forever: Edward Nygma turned to evil and became the Riddler for no other reason than because Bruce Wayne, his employer and the man he admired most in the world, rejected his idea that they become partners in marketing Nygma's invention. What makes this especially petty is that Nygma made twice as much money going into business on his own, and in fact taunts Wayne about his "bad" decision afterward when Nygmatech outperforms Wayne Enterprises. But apparently all of that isn't good enough: the Riddler never forgave Wayne for failing to "understand", and decided to devote the rest of his life to humiliating and then killing him. Chase Meridian actually speculates that Nygma's vendetta with Bruce will only end when Bruce is dead.
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice features one of the more petty versions of Lex Luthor, as his reason for his hatred of Superman stems from viewing Superman as a violation of his belief that God Is Evil or doesn't exist, and thus Superman's mere existence is an affront to him, and sends a senator a jar of his urine just to mock her before killing her and a good chunk of people in Congress, including his own (highly loyal) assistant.
• In Bedazzled (1967), with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the devil's petty pranks are a Running Gag. We see him scratching new albums and putting them back on the shelf at a record store and send out a pigeon to do its "doo-dahs" on a passerby.
  Stanley: Your pranks are so miserable.
• In Bedazzled (2000), Elizabeth Hurley's Devil likes to give people parking fines, tell high school kids not to bother with their studies because they were boring, and swap medication for Tic Tacs. A little more severe when you think of the consequences. Also, cock-blocking Brendan Fraser every chance she got. The end of the movie shows her cheating at a chess game with someone heavily implied to be God.
• Blade Runner 2049 has a tremendous example of this in the third act with Luv who up until then was a more sympathetic antagonist as an replicant. Yet after ambushing K and Deckard, Joi K’s hologram girlfriend makes herself known to plead with Luv to leave the wounded K alone, seeing K reaching desperately to Joi’s emitter on the floor, Luv raises her foot over it and smirking to Joi says “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product” and stomps the emitter inches from K’s face destroying Joi before she can finish telling K she loves him. Luv had no practical reason to do this. Joi was not a threat to her, so why did she do it? Pure spite and jealousy. She told K earlier (after they watched Deckard and Rachel’s interview) how invigorating it is feel desired but K ignores her provocation — clearly Luv took that rejection hard and was more than willing to destroy K and Joi’s happiness at the first opportunity.
• Byzantium: The Brethen have spent two centuries hunting down a mother and her daughter. The reason? Clara was not allowed to sire a vampire because she's a woman. Their motivation is proven to be little more than petty sexism when it's made clear Clara and Eleanor are more than capable of maintaining the Masquerade. In fact, hunting them is arguably leaving more evidence around than simply letting them be.
• A Cinderella Story: Shelby constantly makes fun of Sam for having to work for a living. Borders on Fridge Horror when you realize she does not have a problem with Austin being a gas-station attendant (who like Sam, works for his family's business, they are just taking advantage of the situation like Sam); when you think about it, she essentially tortures Sam for being an abuse victim.
• A repeated motif in The Death of Stalin. Despite Stalin being monstrously evil and all the members of the Presidium collaborators at best or (in the case of Beria) outright enabling the purges, all the principal characters are also incredibly petty, childish, and willing to ruin each others' lives in the most small-minded of ways while innocents get caught in the crossfire. This includes Nikita Khrushchev, the closest thing the film has to a 'good guy'.
• In Derailed (2002), Cole, who has already hijacked a train in attempt to seize a bio-weapon, picks up a passenger's violin and curiously muses that it's a French model from around the 1800s and then smashes it on the table, for no reason than to show how evil he is.
• When you find out who the devil is in the movie Devil, you really have to ask yourself why did she bother to steal that guy's wallet earlier?
• This extends to Mr. Scratch, the devil incarnate, in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Aside from stealing souls, he enjoys petty theft and vandalism. Old Scratch ends the film by stealing a pie Jabez Stone's mother baked. (Fortunately, she had made two.)
• Django Unchained: Calvin Candie is a sadistic slave owner who commits several atrocities during his screentime like having one of his slaves torn apart and eaten by dogs. Later on, he has outsmarted Django and Schultz but allows them to leave after paying him an exorbitant amount of their own money to leave with Broomhilda. Candie tries to force Schultz to shake his hand just to humiliate him further, and even threatens to kill Broomhilda if he doesn't comply — something which Schultz find stupid and counter-productive as that would break the contract they signed. This ends up costing Calvin his life since Schultz decides to kill him for his pettiness.
• Don't Look Up:
  • As Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky arrive to the White House to try to explain to the President the threat of a comet that is going to crash with Earth, their guide General Stuart Themes scams them out of $50 by saying they have to pay for the snacks they took (they are free to guests). Kate brings this up repeatedly throughout the rest of the film as she is utterly astonished by the depths of such a petty act (although that probably should have clued her in on how awful the Orlean administration was going to treat her and Mindy).
  • Jason Orlean, the President's son and Chief of Staff, keeps bullying Kate through the whole film just because he does not likes her and thinks she is poor. That includes ordering the FBI to do the standard "abduct with van and place bag over her head" Government Conspiracy treatment when she tries to defy her Apocalyptic Gag Order — he points out that it was not necessary but he totally wanted to do it.
• In End of Days, the Devil's first actions upon assuming Gabriel Byrne's form is to grope a woman and then blow up the restaurant she's in, then makes a kid who bumped into him get hit by a car.
• Falling Down:
  • Villain Protagonist Bill is forced to kill a Neo-Nazi in self-defense after he assaults him for simply disagreeing with him while Bill tried to defuse the situation by reminding him that it's a free country.
  • Bill himself fell into this rather frequently throughout his Protagonist Journey to Villain, as he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist with a Hair-Trigger Temper. While it was cathartic to see him blowing up at his Asshole Victims, as his Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist Prendergast points out Revenge Is Not Justice and when viewed with an objective lens his actions were quite disproportionate. He smashes up an Asian Store-Owner's shop for slightly overcharging his customers, pulls a gun on a fast-food manager for arbitrarily denying him breakfast, and (indirectly) murders a Grumpy Old Man simply for being rude to him.
• In Five, Eric maliciously drives the group's jeep through the group's cultivated field, destroying part of their crops.
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan: While Jason is walking through Times Square, he callously kicks away the boombox of a group of teenage punks, just because it was in his way. In a deleted scene, he shoves a random pedestrian on an escalator to the ground for the same reason. The script also initially had Jason literally kicking a dog, but his actor refused to do it, since he considered that sort of evil beneath Jason.
• The Green Mile:
  • Penitentiary inmate "Wild Bill" Wharton is a child molester and murderer — and also a Psychopathic Manchild who asks for a fudge cupcake just so he can spit it in a guard's face and laugh about it. He killed the twin girls that J.C. was framed for killing just because he couldn't tolerate them being happy together.
  • On the other side of the bars, there is guard Percy Whetmore. He kills Mr. Jingles just out of pure mean-spiritedness. He later cruelly snuffs Del's final moment of happiness by telling him there is no "Mouseville," for no other reason than he saw the chance.
• When Tree finally finds out who's been causing all her deaths in Happy Death Day, it's her roommate Lori, who didn't like that Tree was having an affair with the (married) guy she liked. Tree is disappointed.
• In the Harry Potter movies:
  • Draco Malfoy is a kleptomaniac.
  • In Order of the Phoenix, among the various things she did in the books, Umbridge forces the students to conform to various old-fashioned rules for behavior (among other things, two students are forcibly separated from kissing and a later rule states that students of opposite genders must remain set distances apart at all times).
• The Kurgan from Highlander isn't just a sadistic murderer and rapist, he also takes a bizarre amount of joy from even tiniest, most inconsequential acts of evil imaginable. At one point, he snuffs out memorial candles and behaves crassly in a church for no reason other than finding it funny. He also likes to indulge in petty and childish taunting whenever he meets other immortals, such as rubbing the rape of MacLeod's wife in the latter's face and using it to claim that he's a better lover than MacLeod.
• Discussed in The Hitman's Bodyguard, where Kincaid bitterly remarks upon the fact that the man who murdered his father wasn't motivated by any sort of larger goal. He wasn't after money or carrying out a personal grudge or anything like that. He was just an angry, sadistic man who wanted to hurt somebody, and Kincaid's dad was as good a target as any.
• Hot Fuzz could have easily been labeled Evil Is Petty: The Movie. The main character, Sgt. Angel, suspects that the murders happening throughout the film were committed because of a conspiracy about a land deal, but when he actually gets to confront The Conspiracy, the members confess that they killed all of the victims for silly and very banal reasons, though for them it was deeply Serious Business. Martin Blower was killed for being a bad actor, Eve Draper was killed for having an affair with Blower and an Annoying Laugh, George Merchant was killed for having a modern-style home that clashes with the local rustic aesthetic, Tim Messenger was killed because of his awful spelling and for running tabloid-esque tripe in the local newspaper. And that is not mentioning their other victims, like the underage drinkers, that shoplifter, those crusty jugglers, the weapons-owning farmer, and the Living Statue.
  Skinner: Blower's fate was simply the result of his being an appalling actor!
  The NWA Members: [in unison] Appalling!
  Angel: You murdered him for that?!
  Skinner: Well, he murdered Bill Shakespeare.
• In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Snow had no real reason to respond to Katniss during the rescue operation and did it simply to reveal that he knew what was going on, and to make sure she remembered him saying that the ones you love are the ones who kill you. If Gale had acted on his suspicions about how the rebels got away even when it was clear they'd walked into a trap, Snow might well have blown his chance to get Peeta to kill Katniss.
• In Jacob Two Two Meets The Hooded Fang, Mister Fox spends his time in town sabotaging toys so that puzzles can't be finished, chemistry sets won't work, etc.
• James Bond:
  • In all of his appearances in the franchise, 007's Arch-Enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a Bad Boss, as he would kill Mooks at the slightest provocation or failing to complete their tasks via The Blofeld Ploy. The ominous threat of violence, the way he runs SPECTRE, and his status as The Dreaded to his henchmen is what forces them in line.
    • His most recent incarnation is quite the Big Brother Bully to 007 in Spectre, tries to sadistically torment him via Cold-Blooded Torture, and claims to have been behind all of Bond's miseries since Casino Royale (2006), all just because an orphaned 007 was favored more by Oberhauser's father when they were younger, causing Oberhauser to commit Patricide out of jealousy and resentment. In No Time to Die, the Spectre attack on Bond and Madeleine Swann in Matera that Blofeld organized from his prison cell aimed at either killing Bond or breaking his newfound relationship with Madeleine. The latter goal succeeded, with Bond never speaking again to Madeleine until five years passed, during which he didn't get to know the daughter he's had with her. No Time to Die also implies that he had Safin's family killed out of mere jealousy that Lyutsifer were adored by his parents, while Hannes Oberhauser favored Bond instead. Blofeld's pettiness, however, ends up becoming his undoing; Safin successfully has him killed through the proxies of Madeleine and then Bond, as Blofeld's gleeful gloating of him being behind the Matera attack causes an angered Bond, who had been unknowingly infected through Madeleine with a strain of the Heracles virus coded to kill Blofeld, to strangle him, infecting him with the virus which then kills him.
  • Octopussy villain Kamal Khan is introduced to the audience not as the head of an illicit empire, or as a willing accomplice to a mad Soviet General who is going to murder thousands of innocent people. Instead, he's cheating at backgammon.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, the villain Elliot Carver is an Expy of Rupert Murdoch who plans to set up a war between Britain and China to increase the ratings of his media empire, and then launch a missile strike on Beijing to wipe out the Chinese government... because China is the only country that refused to give him broadcast rights for his new satellite system.
• Knives Out:
  • Jacob is an alt-right troll, but all the audience sees of his budding alt-right tendencies are pettily mean actions. He calls Meg "Liberal snowflake." During the chaos that ensues when Harlan's will is read out, he yells derogatory racial remarks at Marta. He also films Marta leaving for his Instagram Live, causing masses of people to gather outside the Cabrera household. It adds to the mounting pressure Marta is already facing and helps his father blackmail her.
  • Apart from being a bonafide felon and villain, Ransom is also just a dickwad, period. He takes unbridled pleasure in the tumult that ensues after Harlan's will is read out, and bars "the help" from calling him by the name he actually likes to go by — "because you're an asshole," as Marta plainly puts it.
• After her grand curse, Maleficent divides her time between defending the thorn wall with terrifying magic power, and petty trolling magic at the fairies' cottage for no real reason. She just enjoys making their lives slightly more difficult.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • A big part of Aldrich Killian aka The Mandarin's villainy in Iron Man 3 is nothing but payback for Tony Stark blowing him off at a New Year's party over a decade ago.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): Big Bad Ronan killed the Other just for being annoying, and, when betraying Thanos, he recalls the Mad Titan's previous insult (namely, referring to Ronan as "boy"), indicating that he took the relatively minor remark very personally.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 features an even more monstrous example of this with its Big Bad the High Evolutionary and his fixation on Rocket. What's the main reason the High Evolutionary is so hateful towards the raccoon? In the past, a young Rocket could figure out a small flaw in his evolutionary machine and correct it, and this alone drives the High Evolutionary crazy. That his own creation, a small animal he gave intelligence, could figure out something he couldn't, be in any way smarter than him, infuriates the High Evolutionary so much that he's willing to murder all of Rocket's defenseless friends and mockingly imitate Rocket's cries of grief over it. Suffice to say, having young Rocket rip his face off and later the Guardians giving him a united beatdown in the climax is beyond satisfying.
  • In Spider-Man: Far From Home, the reason why Mysterio and his support crew are willing and able to cause massacres and mass destruction around the world for the sake of creating Engineered Heroics is that they are all former Stark employees that have all been slighted, in some way or another (but highly implied to be minor), by Tony's antics. Even Mysterio himself, who is mentioned to have always been an "unstable" employee, admits he hit his Rage Breaking Point when Tony decided to name the device that uses his holographic technology (the memory-reading glasses first shown in Captain America: Civil War) "B.A.R.F." Even in death, Mysterio finds a way to spite Spider-Man from beyond the grave by releasing doctored footage to the Daily Bugle, framing Peter for his own rampage in London and outing his Secret Identity.
  • It gets worst in Spider-Man: No Way Home when Green Goblin resurfaces... he proceeds to further ruin Peter's life cause he reminds him of Raimi Peter and that he wants to make him into a monster like him... purely for his twisted amusement thankfully Raimi and Webb Peter put a wrench into his plans by reminding MCU Peter that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. With MCU Peter giving him a Death he didn't want: by getting injected by an Anti-Goblin Serum. The icing to the cake was Goblin's face having an Oh, Crap! moment as he looks at MCU Peter's face which is now calm with anger not laced with Hatred.
• Mr. Majestyk: When Renda's men cannot find Majestyk, he has them machine gun his watermelon crop in an act of petty vindictiveness.
• More Dead Than Alive: After luring Cain into an ambush and beating him into unconsciousness, Luke Santee steals back the $2 he had paid Cain to trick him into the ambush.
• No Country for Old Men: Anton Chigurh shows this a few times.
  • He's willing to kill a gas station attendant in simple annoyance at him for making polite small talk and revealing that he "married into" ownership of the gas station.
  • Anton attempts to shoot a crow he passes by in his car for no apparent reason other than to kill something. He misses.
  • Llewelyn gets told later on in the film that, even if he had just ditched the money and ran away once he figured out how much over his head he was, Anton would have still hunted him down and killed him for the sake of getting rid of a man who "inconvenienced" him.
  • He carries out the promise he gave to Llewelyn that he would kill Sara Jean (Llewelyn’s wife) even after Llewelyn is dead because he promised he would.
• Ocean's Twelve: Toulour, the "Night Fox", tries to destroy Danny Ocean and his ten conspirators after hearing his mentor praise Ocean's Bellagio heist as one of the best robberies ever. The night before the crew are due to steal the Faberge egg, Tolour calls Danny's hotel room and pretends to be his 5am wake-up call even though it's only 11:30pm just to be a jerk.
  Rusty: Oh. [disgusted] Oh! He's mean... He's just mean-spirited.
• In Our Friend Power 5, the actions of The Shark Gang range from "messing with people's lunches" to "stealing Yesular's wand" to "murdering children".
• Pacific Rim: In the opening battle with the Kaiju Knifehead, the enormous beast with the power to decimate a city goes out of its way to hunt a small fishing boat miles away from the coast, just to kill the handful of people onboard. This is one of the first clues that the Kaiju are in fact not wild animals, but artificial bioweapons created to exterminate humans.
• Raising Arizona: Leonard Smalls, the lone biker of the apocalypse, is introduced in a nightmare driving down a desert road using his shotgun and hand grenades to kill various lizards and rabbits he passes by for no other reason than simple malice.
• Saw: Jigsaw's motives are nowhere near as noble as he likes to think.
  • While his primary victims are "people who have wasted their lives", Jigsaw also targets people who have wronged him in some way, and later in the series targets the police operatives investigating him. As the series continues and back-builds his history, it becomes increasingly clear that many of his victims are people he has a personal connection with and just doesn't care for how they chose to live their lives.
  • The criteria of targeting "people who have wasted their lives" or lived lives that caused harm to others, is pretty broad. The victim roster ranges from drug dealers and rapists to prostitutes and drug addicts, to people feeling suicidal and practicing self-harm, to just people that suffered Bystander Syndrome and did nothing while seeing something terrible happen. In Jigsaw's mind, all of these offenses are deserving of death.
• Scream (2022): Amber and Richie are easily the pettiest killers to don the Ghostface mask thus far. While even Jill and Charlie at least had the goal of being rich and famous, Amber and Richie went on a killing spree because they didn't like a movie. Hating the direction the Stab franchise had taken, they concocted a plan to bring it Back To Basics... and since the best Stab movies were Based on a True Story, naturally, that several meant innocent people had to die so there'd be a basis for a new movie.
• In Shandra: The Jungle Girl, Corrupt Corporate Executive Travis Fox refuses to pay Diego for his services as a jungle guide (despite Diego's brother dying on the expedition). This comes back to bite him on the ass when Diego provides assistance to a group of employees looking to screw Travis over.
• Shortcut to Happiness: After two kids on scooters almost collide with the Devil, she causes them to crash. When Stone objects, she airily replies that she should have set them on fire.
• Smosh: The Movie: Steve YouTube says that one of the reasons he plans on trapping Ian and Anthony in his website forever is because they didn't think his penis joke was that funny.
• In Space Cowboys, NASA project director Bob Gerson is this trope. He denied the heroes their chance to go into space 40 years ago by replacing them with a chimpanzee and is bent on not letting them go in the present because they're old and maintains an important part of the mission's intel that could risk both their lives (and those of a significant amount of people on Earth, if it goes wrong) secret out of spite. When the team finally succeeds, he goes around saying to everyone that he always knew they could do it.
• Star Wars:
  • Darth Vader is normally too disciplined to indulge in this, but he does show one subtle instance if one considers Obi-Wan's line of "I have the high ground" from their duel on Mustafar during Revenge of the Sith. Rogue One shows that Vader lives in a castle rising several stories above Mustafar's soil. In the same scene, he Force chokes Director Krennic just for the sake of a pun (and because he thinks Krennic is annoying).
  • Darth Sidious lives by this. He deliberately crafted his lightsabers using the rarest and most expensive materials known to man simply to mock Jedi humility despite the fact that none of them would ever get a good look at them; they had been gathering dust in his office for 20 years prior to the Revenge of the Sith.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: General Hux becomes The Mole inside the First Order just to spite Kylo Ren. And in the climax, the reborn Emperor Palpatine force grabs an already defeated Ben Solo and declares that the last Skywalker will fall as he did... literally; he spitefully hurls Ben into a nearby pit just as Anakin did to him in Return of the Jedi, for no other reason than to posthumously stick it to Anakin through his grandson.
• Strangers on a Train: Shortly before murdering Miriam, Bruno Antony goes out of his way to pop a little boy's balloon, just because he can.
• Strays (2023): Doug openly states that he hates Reggie and only keeps him because his girlfriend liked the dog and keeping Reggie was the best way to hurt her.
• Tales from the Hood:
  • When Duke Metzger's slaveholding ancestor had to surrender his slaves at the end of the Civil War, he preferred to massacre all of them.
  • And "Mr. Simms" spends the entire movie hammily toying with his three latest victims before revealing who he really is.
• Trading Places: The Duke Brothers enact a bet between themselves that causes their best employee, Louis Winthorpe, to suffer utter, borderline suicide-inducing homeless hell and would have gotten Billy Ray Valentine, the man they hired to replace him (as one of the steps to cause the aforementioned hell) fired for no better reason that an argument about the value of nature vs. nurture. And that bet? One dollar!
• True Lies: After Juno taunts Helen about her husband Harry's likely death, Helen slaps her in the face, which leaves a scratch mark. Juno's response is to try to shoot her, but she's stopped by Aziz.
• In Violent Saturday, the murderous bank robber and benzedrine addict Dill stomps on the hand of a small boy who collides with him.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin is essentially a film made entirely around this trope. Many examples, but perhaps one of the most entertaining is when Eva tells Kevin that he may have a new brother or sister. He spends the entire conversation snapping all his crayons in half. He even goes the extra mile of performing the massacre on his school with a bow and arrow. Afterwards, Kevin wants to make it extra clear that he didn't kill all of those people because of some "hot-button" political issue that will inevitably be flung around in the aftermath — he just wanted them dead because they annoyed him.
• In What's the Worst That Could Happen?, Fairbanks catches Kevin in fraganti while the latter is stealing his house and calls the cops. Kevin overall is okay with that, as getting caught is an occupational hazard for a burglar. And then Fairbanks lies that a ring Kevin is wearing (a gift of Kevin's girlfriend) is his property just for the sake of the fun of "stealing something from the thief". This puts Kevin on the warpath. And then Fairbanks absolutely refuses to give the ring back even after Kevin has brought him to near ruin and makes clear there is only one thing that will make him stop, and the only other person that doesn't thinks it's stupid is Fairbanks' insane head of security.

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