As we all know, everyone loves an antihero, and cinema has certainly provided us with some of the best over the years. Enthrenched firmly in the murky waters of moral and ethical quandary, they speak to us of all that's good and bad in humanity.
Below are listed my personal favourites, seven of the best antiheroes to ever inhabit a moral grey-area. Why seven? Heck if I know, but it's a nice round figure...
He participates in fraud, racketeering, bullying, thuggery, murder and theft. He kills his brother. He is not, by any definition, a nice man. So why do we have sympathy for Michael Corleone? Why do we care about him?
Maybe it's because we've seen him fall, we've seen him try and climb from the mire only, as he acknowledges late in his life, to time and again get "dragged back in". Maybe we like Michael because we can understand why he made the choices he did, why he started down a path to eventual self-destruction: the love of his family and desire to do all he could to protect them.
As an object lesson in the corrupting nature of power, Michael Corleone is beyond compare. As a hero, he is flawed, corruptible and, ultimately, impotent against the forces he seeks to control and defeat. Perhaps that's why he's so likeable–he's believable.
Defining quote: "I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies."
Sarcastic, amoral, brutal, vicious and egocentric. These are probably the nicest things you could say about Jack Carter (as Michael Caine portrays him; for the purposes of this article, the Stallone remake-come-abomination never happened, okay?). He spends the entire film stomping, shooting and punching his way through a series of almost-as-despicable-as-he-is gangster sorts. Because he's doing all this to find out who killed his brother and why they did it, we're supposed to be okay with it. And, to be honest, we are. Mostly.
It's probably wrong that we cheer him on. It's probably wrong that we want him to wreak his vengeance, to storm through those nasty Geordie gangsters like a dodgy curry through someone with IBS. Scratch that, it IS wrong. We're being made into accomplices, we're giving our tacit agreement to a course of violence. But yet... He's just achingly cool. The man walks the mean streets of Newcastle armed only with a pump-action shotgun and a great collection on one-liners. For instance: "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself". Y'see? That's funny. And cool. And badass. I'm pretty sure that ticks every necessary box on the "funny, cool, badass antihero" list. Yes.
Defining quote: "Frank wasn't like that. I'm the villain in the family, remember?"
Nick is a very likeable man. He has to be, it’s his job. He is the man who tells you that smoking is good for you, and you believe it. You want to smoke, it makes you cool. Naylor is “the Sultan of Spin”, a wizard with words, the Vice President and chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It’s a group that researches the link between smoking and cancer but, as it’s funded by the cigarette companies, finds no link (quelle surprise, non?). It is Nick’s job to inform the world of these "facts" and defend the rights of smokers.
Even when he gets kidnapped by a group of anti-smokers, who wallop so many nicotine patches on him that he almost dies, he refuses to give up. If anything, it makes him want to do it more, as he knows he is getting through to people. Besides, you have to have a certain level of admiration for a man whose job it is to defend companies that kill 1,200 people a day, yet marches onto a talk show, going face to face with a teenager with cancer. He not only manages to turn the crowd around from booing and hissing to cheering and clapping, but even shakes the hand of ‘cancer boy’ afterwards. He may be absolutely mind-blowing in his subdued villainy, but we love him for it. Kind of.
Defining quote: "Gentlemen, practise these words in front of the mirror: Although we are constantly exploring the subject, currently there is no direct evidence that links cellphone usage to brain cancer.... Michael Jordan plays ball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk. Everyone has a talent."
Real men smoke cigars. Real real men smoke cigars and wear ponchos while shooting nasty Mexican villains and spouting witty one-liners. Therefore, as far as we can ascertain, Clint Eastwood's 'Man With No Name' is the realest real man that's ever walked the dusty plains of God's green earth. Or the Mexican borderlands.
Either way, "The Man With No Name" (or "Joe", "Monco" or "Blondie", as he's actually known in the movies–yes, he has three names Sergio, you silly director) is a very cool dude. Not exactly a likeable chap, however. Willingness to cheat you for a fistful of dollars? Check. Willingness to shoot you in the eye at a moment's provocation? Check. Yet he's never as bad as the folk he's shooting, thumping, cheating or otherwise muttering semi-incoherently at, so that's alright. We think. As per convention, the secret lies in making his character marginally less reprehensible than his enemies. Throw in a good deed or two, some humour just to confuse the issue and Eastwood's inimitable charm and you have one of cinema's truly iconic bad-but-sort-of-good-guys.
Also, that poncho's cool.
Defining quote: "You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig."
Jack Sparrow is, frankly, the only reason to bother watching the overly bloated Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (okay, so the first two are good, but the third one is as turgid as turgid gets). Depp’s portrayal of the enigmatic Sparrow is nothing short of brilliant, and even managed to garner him his first Oscar nomination. As far as the other characters in the Pirates universe are concerned, he is a horrible man, only out for himself. Whenever you think he might be doing something for the good of the group or to be a hero, you find you're wrong. Sparrow puts it best himself: “Me, I'm dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid.”
Existing in a perpetual drunken haze, Jack slurs his speech, staggers from one disaster to another and generally appears to be incapable of walking in a straight line, let alone sailing in one. However, this, along with his rather eccentric and contrived vocabulary is all part of the Sparrow Swagger, leaving many to wonder if, in reality, he plans all his actions out.
Despite his swaggering attempts to be the back-stabbing bad-guy, Jack is not a particularly good Pirate. He doesn’t even like to fight, preferring to turn tail and do one at the earliest opportunity. Above all, though, I love Captain Jack for almost single-handedly bringing pirates back into vogue. Thanks Jack. Thanks a bunch.
Defining quote: "No. You want you to find this, because the finding of this finds you incapacitorially finding and or locating in your discovering the detecting of a way to save your dolly belle, ol' what's-her-face. Savvy?"
Were movie characters comparable to fruit, Neil McCauley would be an entire field of cucumbers. Yup, he's that cool. Dedicated, focussed, meticulous, unflappable. He'll think nothing of innocent bystanders as he engages in a running gun battle with the police. He'll execute security guards at a moments notice, just to prevent there being any witnesses. He is, without doubt, thoroughly reprehensible. The quintessential evil villain. An utter git.
Or is he? We see the way he cares for the men in his "crew", encouraging them to "do the smart thing" and go straight as soon as the can. Trying to keep their marriages together. Promising to help desperate women if their husbands don't start behaving themselves. Yet, in a few hours, he'll abandon someone he purports to love just to settle a score. What is going on in his head? Was there some terrible mistake that set his life on a self-destructive path many years ago? Is he schizophrenic? The film's end certainly hints at the possibility that Neil does actually want to get caught, despite his protestations that he's not "doin' thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a "Born to Lose" tattoo" on his chest. He deliberately walks into a situation that he knows violates all the principles he's been so keen to expound though out the rest of the film. Maybe he's a dead-loser hiding under a veneer of detached cool. Maybe he's just been lucky up until now. Or maybe, just maybe, he cares more than he lets on...
Defining quote: "There is a flip side to that coin. What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down? Cause no matter what, you will not get in my way. We've been face to face, yeah. But I will not hesitate. Not for a second."
Assassin, plant-lover, befriender of pre-teen girls, innocent man-child and hat wearer par exellence, Léon is, frankly, as cool as bad guys get. Yes, bad guy. There's no denying it, he's a bad guy. He kills people. For money. Man-child or no, this puts him quite firmly on the "bad guy" side of the moral fence. Still, those that he has to fight against are, in our eyes, badder "bad guys". From Mathilda's abusive and neglectful parents to Gary Oldman's corrupt, pill-popping, scenery-chewing cop, Stansfield, everyone else (even Mathilda, the abused, emotionally scarred killer-in-waiting) makes Léon look like a paragon of virtue.
The opening scene sets the tone beautifully. Silently, deliberately, Leon infiltrates a penthouse and, one-by-one, picks of the highly-paid bodyguards before quietly disposing of the main target. Then he goes home and drinks some milk while watering his plant. Later he marches through an entire SWAT team with the kind of panache that most of us will never know. Damn it.
After being coaxed into an awkward friendship by Natalie Portman's (in her best ever role) precocious street urchin, he teaches her how to care for plants, how to do sit-ups and, after some persuasion, how to 'clean' (i.e. how to fire a lead projectile through a cranium from 300 yards away). Which is nice. He does all of this while wearing the worst braces, vest and beanie-hat combo the world's ever seen. He even manages to pull of wearing Lennon-style sunglasses.
Léon is, officially, the coolest bad guy I've ever seen, and I'm really not sure if I like him. Which, I guess, is kind of the point.
Defining quote: "No women, no kids, that's the rules."
So that's that, my definitive list of Hollywood's best antiheroes. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think I'm out of my tiny mind for missing out an utterly obvious choice (this is a distinct possibility, by the way)? Then let me know...
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