Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain / Live-Action Films

• Prince Edward in Braveheart. He tries so hard to meet his father Longshanks' expectations, but he never does.
• The Newspaper Boy in Better Off Dead.
• Jerry Londegaard in Fargo. You're inclined to distrust him because he's a greedy, petty salesman who ran a criminal get-rich-quick scheme that ruins several lives, including his wife, who ends up murdered, but at the same time, he's also played as really bumbling and inept, with much of the bigger problems being caused by the short-sidedness of his plan and tendency to panic when things go wrong, ironically making things even worse. He effectively is still the "bad guy" of the story, but the degree to which things spiral terribly out of control for him make him weirdly sympathetic.
• RoboGadget, the evil android duplicate of the protagonist of Inspector Gadget (1999). He actually makes the iconic Idiot Hero look competent when they confront each other.
• Justin Hammer from Iron Man 2, though more "ineffectual" (and humorous) than "sympathetic". More to the point he pretends to be an Evil Counterpart of Tony Stark, but is actually a pompous clown whose products are of very poor quality, whose attempts to intimidate the actual villain of the movie would work better on a five-year old, and whose henchmen are incompetent rentacops who carry mace and tasers.
• Vincent Price as Shelby Carpenter in Laura. This is how his own girlfriend sums him up:
  "He's no good, but he's what I want. I'm not a nice person, Laura, and neither is he. He knows I know he's just what he is. He also knows that I don't care. We belong together because we're both weak and can't seem to help it. That's why I know he's capable of murder.^note Keep in mind that she says he's capable of murder. He doesn't actually do it. He's like me."
• Nux from Mad Max: Fury Road. He wants to die and ascend to Valhalla thanks to the brainwashing of Immortan Joe, but Nux just fails at it so miserably that he enters a Villainous BSoD. He finally makes a Heel–Face Turn, and takes a level in badass as a result.
• Peter Lorre — as he was frequently typecast the "Sad Monster" after M — got to play quite a few of these in his career. Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Arsenic and Old Lace, and in pretty much all of his later career, particularly in his team-ups with Vincent Price.
• On the other hand, Elisha Cook Jr.. made Peter Lorre look lucky. At least Lorre survived most of the above examples (and in Arsenic and Old Lace, he even pulled off a Karma Houdini). The same can't be said for poor Elisha in Phantom Lady, The Big Sleep, Born To Kill (where, shortly before his character's death, he tries to menace a little old lady, only to have the little old lady kick his ass!), or The Killing. In Shane, he's practically a good guy version of this trope. But the best example of how much worse off Cook is compared to Lorre is in The Maltese Falcon, where they're both ISVs. Sam Spade disarms and humiliates Cook's Wilmer far more often than he does Lorre's Joel Cairo, despite the fact that Wilmer's a multiple murderer and Cairo isn't. And at the end, their mutual boss (and possibly more) Casper Guttman sells out Wilmer to the authorities while happily walking off arm in arm with Cairo (although they all end up in jail). Joel Cairo may be more pathetic than you, but Wilmer is even more pathetic than Cairo.
  • In I Wake Up Screaming, where he's both the murderer and a pathetic weakling, he just goes to jail.
  • One critic said of Cook that 'his very appearance seems like an invitation to destroy him'.
  • Things have turned around for him by the time he plays the mobster Icepick in Magnum, P.I. who inverts it.
• The artist collective (barring Bill) that is behind the titular Murder Party, which constituted of taking hapless Chris hostage all the while planning his death, somehow manage to fail at being a threat to him and were more succesful at being a threat to their own well-being, as they actually seriously hurt themselves, in a few cases, while he just sits there gagged up and helpless for most of the film.
• The Pink Panther movies:
  • Inspector Clouseau, inverted this, as he originally was intended as an incompetent version of Inspector Javert in the original The Pink Panther (1963), but he managed to be so much more sympathetic than protagonist Charles "The Phantom" Lytton that he was retooled into the protagonist of the film's sequels who was still a moron but with lady luck on his side.
  • In the following film, A Shot in the Dark, Clouseau transmitted the ineffectual condition to his boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (soon to become the former Chief Inspector Dreyfus). Dreyfus is actually a good detective who, it's implied, would never have gone Ax-Crazy if it hadn't been for Clouseau. After his Face–Heel Turn, poor Dreyfus has to look on helplessly as Clouseau survives all of Dreyfus' numerous murder attempts solely due to the dumbest of dumb luck.
  • And THEN, in Son of the Pink Panther, Dreyfus gets a reboot into sympathetic, if not protagonist, at least The Woobie status, as his complete descent into Axe-Crazy has apparently been retconned out of existence and him back INTO existence. He even gets the girl with the down side of now being the stepfather to his late nemesis Clouseau's long-lost son. Still the Butt-Monkey, if not the ISV.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Amber Sweet. She's just as nasty as her brothers, but she's usually too high on zydrate to be effectual.
  • And Luigi and Pavi aren't much better, given that Luigi, despite his claims that only he's got brains enough, comes across as a simple minded Psycho Knife Nut and Pavi spends most of his time staring at his own face in the mirror he forever carries with him. That being said, Luigi is quite effective in the "stabbing people for no good reason" compartment, which makes him the least harmless of the Largo siblings.
• Sol and Vince, the loser duo of pawnshop crooks who try their hand at the big(ger) leagues, in Snatch.. It does not go well for them.
• Gargamel, mostly, comes off as this in The Smurfs. Until he gets his hands on Smurf Essence, that is.
• Muerte ("name for death!") in Undercover Blues. Muerte's reputation on the streets is hinted at as being formidable, but his utterly humiliating defeat at the hands of Jeff Blue quickly turned him into one of these. Every lost tooth just makes him that much more lovable.
• The Elite Squad: Fábio Barbosa is a Dirty Cop yet unlike other antagonists in the series who are violent and realistic depictions of Brazilian drug lords and corrupt policemen, he comes across as a pathetic, spineless Butt-Monkey who gets beaten and berated in the first movie, and in the second one, he is bossed around by his own subordinate Major Rocha. With that said Fábio is the one to actually kill Rocha himself rather than the protagonists and its implied he becomes a Not-So-Harmless Villain in the epilogue.

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