Then Let Me Be Evil / Live-Action Films

SPOILER WARNING: The nature of this trope means that spoilers abound. Tread carefully.

Then Let Me Be Evil moments in Live-Action Films.

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• The Amazing Spiderman 2 gives us the villain Electro. At first, he was just Max Dillon, an ordinary Oscorp electrician and powerless loser who nobody paid attention to, to where people even forgot it was his birthday. Then his boss forces him to work a late night shift, leading to the fateful accident that would give him his powers. When he got them, he was taunted and jeered as a freak of nature, which only got worse when an officer tries to snipe him just as Spider-Man was reasoning with him. Next he got experimented on (read: tortured) by Dr Kafka. By the time he escaped, he decided that if people wanted a monster, he'll show them what a monster was.
• Bit: Duke views women as demonized by society, to the point they should simply embrace it as vampires, becoming what she thinks they're perceived as.
• In Change of Habit, Julio's attempt at returning the church statue he stole only gets him arrested and blamed for breaking it, so he gives up on good and tries to rape Michelle.
• The Creature from the Black Lagoon is given this treatment in the sequel Revenge of the Creature. A science team is sent to Black Lagoon to capture the Creature and bring him back for scientific study. Said "scientific study" seems to mainly involve whacking him with underwater cattle prods for reasons which are never explained. After watching the Creature be harassed and brutalized for no apparent reason in the first half of the movie, a modern viewer may have mixed feelings upon the Creature's escape, where he does, in fact, kill people, but at this point "man, Humans Are the Real Monsters" seems to be an appropriate response.
• D.E.B.S.: This would be why Lucy decides to blow up Australia after Amy rejects her.
• Descendants: After a misunderstanding at the big picnic, all the Auradon kids except Ben are convinced that the villain kids really are rotten to the core. Even the ones who tried to give them a chance have turned their backs on them. It is then that the four discard any previous doubts or guilt over their villainous plans and decide to show Auradon just how rotten they are. During the coronation, however, they have a full change of heart and choose to be good, saving Auradon from Maleficent.
  • Inverted in the third film; Audrey, Sleeping Beauty's daughter, has strived her whole life to be the same standard of good as her mother and all the other fairytale princesses in Auradon. But after the villain kids choose to be good and save Auradon, everyone praises and adores them, especially Audrey's boyfriend Ben, who ends dumping her for Mal, the daughter of her family's worst enemy. Audrey is bitter that she has been the perfect example of good her whole life, only to be overlooked in favor of Mal and the VKs, who only recently became good and got everything she grew up expecting to be hers. When Ben proposes to Mal, meaning that Audrey has lost him for good, it's the breaking point for the princess, and she decides that if Auradon wants a villain, she'll be twice the villain Mal ever was.
    Audrey: If they want a villain for a Queen;
    I'm gonna be one like they've never seen!
• Essentially the premise of Double Jeopardy. Since the protagonist has already been convicted for a murder she didn't commit (and which never actually happened), she figures she may as well go ahead and actually commit it, since she's told she can't be tried for it again (this is severe Hollywood Law though, as they would be legally separate offenses).
• Played with extensively in Edward Scissorhands. Edward is sweet, harmless, and eager to please by nature but circumstances have left him with a skewed sense of morality at best. When Kim, the woman he has fallen in love with, asks him to help rob her boyfriend Jim's house (Jim having convinced her to ask Edward to do this), he does it — and solely takes the fall for it when he is arrested — simply because she asked him to. That she does not seem to appreciate his sacrifice, which turns the neighborhood against him, leaves him bitter. Later, he accidentally wounds her hand and Jim (who is jealous of Kim's growing concern for him) drives him away, telling him "You can't touch anything without destroying it"; Edward's response is to rage through the neighborhood destroying his own topiaries and the like, fully in this mode...but he near-instantly regrets this. He then saves Kim's younger brother from being run over by Jim's van, but accidentally wounds the boy and the neighbors are now in complete panic; after injuring Jim in self-defense he flees back to the mansion at the hill at Kim's urging. Both she and Jim follow and in the resultant confrontation Edward deliberately kills Jim — as much to protect Kim as himself. His last word to Kim is simply "Goodbye"; picking up on this she convinces the angry mob outside that Edward and Jim killed each other, which allows him to finally be left alone and safe, but with everyone except Kim believing he ended up evil.
• In Four Lions, one of the protagonists (Hasan) complains about Muslims sharing his appearance to be generalized as bombers, and thus proceeds to blow himself up... with silly string.
• In Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, it is revealed that Godzilla and Rodan only hate humans because humans hate them.
  Shobijin: Godzilla says he has no reason to save humans. They are always bullying me. Rodan agrees with him.
• Girl, Interrupted has Lisa, a diagnosed sociopath, deliver this line when asked why she was reading aloud the main character's diary:
  Lisa: I'm playing the villain, baby. Just like you want. I try to give you everything you want.
• Halloween Ends introduces Corey Cunningham, who becomes a local pariah after the accidental death of a child he was babysitting and the accusation of murder by the child's mother. Made worse by the fact that Haddonfield was just seeking an easy target to vent their frustration, cruelty, and grief for the Michael Myers killings on, a fact that is pointed out in-universe. After an ambiguous encounter with Myers, Corey becomes the rabid serial killer everyone treated him as, committing several murders.
• The Hunt (2020): After they were accused of hunting people for sport as a result of a leaked joking text, Athena and her friends all got fired. They then decided to really hunt the people who accused them. Crystal points out how dumb this was-to avenge themselves on a false accusation, they made it true.
• Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019) just wanted to add a little joy to a cruel, dark world by making people laugh. Unfortunately, he's a terrible comedian, he has no friends, and his mental issues and lack of social skills tend to alienate everyone around him. Nonetheless, he keeps on trying, but over the course of the film, misfortunes continue to pile up (he's fired from his job as a clown for bringing a gun to a children's hospital, the coworker that smuggled him the gun throws him under the bus to protect his own job, his medication is cut off, he finds out he was apparently abused by his possibly adoptive mother during his childhood, and his role model Murray Franklin mocks his standup attempt on national television), and eventually he can't take it anymore. Seeing how the Gotham public loves his clown persona (as he had murdered three rich Jerkasses in self-defence while in makeup, which was mistakenly seen as the act of an anti-elitist vigilante) but don't even know Arthur Fleck exists, he decides he might as well give the people what they want, abandoning his old life and name, rechristening himself as Joker.
• In Let Me In it's heavily implied to be one of the reasons why Owen runs away with Abby at the end, despite her being a vampire who eats people. Near the end of the film, he has a phone call with his father asking whether people can be evil, implying he's not sure whether Abby's evil and he is for liking her. However, considering how cruel the normal "good" world has been to him (Owen's neglected by his parents and emotionally and physically tortured every day by bullies at school while Abby's kind to him, protects him and gives him attention/affection), it's rather hard to blame Owen for deciding he wants to live with her by the end of the film.
• In The Man from Laramie, Vic's final descent into full-on Big Bad mode by attempting to murder Alec and calling the Apaches to collect a wagonload of guns (which he had earlier killed Dave to prevent) has shades of this.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Loki, as discussed above under Comics. This one spends most of Thor alternately trying to be a worthy son and being an underhanded jerkass, while going steadily more insane due to Parental Issues and Internalized Categorism. This comes at the end. No one explicitly rejects him as such, but he goes through a number of felt rejections that...aren't false: 1) Thor selected as heir and generally adored, 2) Thor ignores him for whole opening when Loki doesn't catch him alone, and runs him down when he does, 3) Odin turns out to have adopted him for political reasons because 4) Laufey threw him away to die as an infant. 5) Everyone he knows is racist against Frost Giants. 6) All his friends distrust him. (They're right, but ascribe more sinister motives than his real ones.) Then he attempts suicide. In his subsequent appearances, he has embraced this trope.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has a song devoted to this, 'Let The Monster Rise'. It shows how Nathan allows his Repo Man persona take over in order to save his daughter.
  Nathan: Have I failed my daughter?
  Then let the father die!
  And let the monster RISE! [goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge]
• In Se7en, John Doe attempts to use this as a rationalization. He explains that he's so sick of living in a Crapsack World full of evil that someone had to do something, and so he decided to orchestrate a truly horrific, disgusting murder spree to force people to awaken to the horrific nature of society: "We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed...forever." Granted, Doe is clearly viewing life through a highly distorted moral lens, but he's so determined to follow through on his ideas that he dies for them. The film refuses to make a statement about just how right Doe is—the "good guy" cops clearly agree that their world is an absolutely miserable one, Officer Somerset comments that people really don't seem to care and would rather slip into apathy and hatred because it's easier than loving and hard work, and the movie's final lines are Somerset remarking that the world may be "worth fighting for," but it sure isn't good.
• Star Wars:
  • Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side in the prequel trilogy is at least partially due to this. While he was lured to the Dark Side from Palpatine's manipulations convincing him he could prevent death, every circumstance built up to that moment. Born a slave, removed from his mother's care and later seeing her die, it was clear to him since the get-go that nobody on the Jedi Council wanted Anakin to be trained because he has the potential to become very powerful and evil. They only agree to train Anakin because Obi-Wan insisted, being the dying request of Qui-Gon Jinn. Throughout Anakin's career as a Jedi they keep him on a very tight leash and leave him out of the loop, when Anakin was placed on the Jedi Council at Palpatine's request, they denied him the rank of Master to spite him and Palpatine, which he took as a direct insult. Much later, he was actually on the brink of redemption with the Jedi when he informed them that Palpatine was a Sith Lord, but in a pitched battle Palpatine slaughtered several Jedi but was (at least apparently) at the mercy of Mace Windu. In an instinct, Anakin defended Palpatine, which only led to Windu's death. His reaction when it was over was an exhausted "What have I done?" and later pledging loyalty to Palpatine, with the implication that he had already gone this far, so there was no reason to stop, and he became Darth Vader.
  • The Last Jedi has another example with Luke Skywalker of all people in his influence over Kylo Ren in the Backstory to the sequel trilogy. Back when Luke was teaching young Force-sensitives to become Jedi, he noticed that Ben Solo, Han Solo and Princess Leia's son, had the potential to become a very powerful Jedi, but that there was also a darkness corrupting him. Luke came to the conclusion that he will grow up to become just as powerful and dangerous as Darth Vader. So he decided to kill Ben in his sleep, but stopped himself at the last minute, realizing that he was doing the wrong thing. Unfortunately, Ben woke up, saw his own uncle over him with a drawn lightsaber, and defended himself. He then killed half the other students and burned down the Jedi school that Luke Skywalker was running. Luke's fear became a reality because he gave up on Ben out of fear, just like the Jedi Council never accepted Anakin out of fear.
• Killer Croc is rather poignantly summarized this way when being introduced in Suicide Squad (2016), despite generally being a Flat Character within the film. Some comic books explore this aspect of the character in greater detail
  "He looked like a monster, so they treated him like a monster, then he became a monster."
• The Usual Suspects: Keaton claims that he is really in love with his lawyer girlfriend and was trying to set himself up as a legitimate restauranteur. However, when the police bring him in for the line-up right at the beginning of the movie, arresting him at dinner with his potential investors, he realizes that his investors are going to back out of doing business with an ex-con, and he will never be able to set up a legal business. So, since the police will never let him put his past behind him, he might as well embrace it.
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Since Jane thought she had crippled Blanche, she apparently snapped and became cruel because she thought that she was a bad person and played the part of an evil sister. When she finds out she was innocent, she reverts to a sweet, innocent girl - note the use of soft lighting from then on.
• The VVitch: Thomasin spends the movie being tormented by her mother who falsely accuses her of being a witch who is presumed to have killed her baby brother, ruined their settlement, and stolen her silver cup. By the end of the movie, she becomes a witch.
• Wolves: Connor's backstory, in his version of events.
  Connor: They took away the woman I loved. So I became the monster they said I always was.
• X-Men: Apocalypse: Erik Lehnsherr simply cannot escape his past as Magneto. Despite his best efforts, his family is killed because of said past and, afterwards, he surrenders himself to his pain and joins Apocalypse.
• Directly invoked in Young Frankenstein once the Creature gains intelligence and speech.
  For as long as I can remember people have hated me. They looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear.

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