For the next entry in our Year by Year series, I proposed a list of Best Villain Death scenes. This idea proved problematic because what we would have, in effect, is an entire list of spoilers. So we went back to the drawing board for the next Year by Year feature. However, that idea of bad guys still appealed to me.
There is nothing like alliteration. The dearly departed musician Vic Chesnutt called it the "spice of life." So as a death list of villains went out the window, it morphed into a list of Bitches, Bastards and Badasses.
Some of the more interesting characters in our filmic history fall into one of these categories. Do people really like the sweet and straitlaced Dorothy? Fuck no, it's the Wicked Witch that runs away with The Wizard of Oz. I am pleased to present this new feature as we celebrate the biggest Bitches, Badasses the cinema world has thrown at us. - David Harris
1999: Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), Election, Bitch
"Her pussy gets so wet you can't believe it." So says doomed teacher Dave Novotny (Marek Harelik) right before he is canned for fucking his goodie two shoes student and all around bitch Tracy Flick. But while Novtony's dismissal may be well-deserved, Flick is also the downfall of teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) for fucking with her. We all knew students like Tracy Flick in high school: head of the student council, always raising their hand in class, ambitious as all get out. But Flick is something special. When she wants something, and in the case of Election, it's the school presidency, she will let nothing stop in her way, doing whatever it takes to ensure victory.
Before Witherspoon's career withered into leading roles in romantic comedies, she gave a daring turn as a character so unlikable and so vile that even Broderick's philandering and unsatisfied Mr. McAllister warrants our pity. In a film with the same societal criticisms as American Beauty, but minus the bombast, McAllister thinks he can use Flick's ambitions to elevate his own pathetic quality of life. Too bad he's wrong. Not only does Flick win the presidency, she costs McAllister his job and his family. But perhaps McAllister best explains his motivations: "The sight of Tracy at that moment affected me in a way I can't fully explain. Part of it was that she was spying; but mostly it was her face. Who knew how high she would climb in life? How many people would suffer because of her? I had to stop her... now!" - David Harris
2000: Drug Addiction, Requiem for a Dream, Bitch
Requiem for a Dream is a tough film to watch, and an even tougher one to forget. The specter of addiction, that powerfully manipulative bitch to whose siren song one old woman and three naïve young people tragically succumb, permeates every scene, every second - and haunts us long after the screen fades to black. Sarah Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) spends her days alone, watching infomercials, finding solace in bites of chocolate and dreams of success and happiness for her heroin-addict son, Harry (Jared Leto). Together with his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), Harry hopes to score big as a dealer and eventually go legit, helping Marion open a fashion design business. Summer whiles away and the cash piles up; things look promising and the three kids feel their dreams within reach. But when the streets get rough, supplies run dry and Harry learns that Sara has started taking amphetamines in order to lose weight for a supposed stint on television - an opportunity, she claims, that gives her "a reason to smile" - his fears for her and for himself, for the dreams they cling to despite the encroaching shadow of dependence and despair, begin to consume them all.
Director Darren Aronofsky creates a superbly chilling atmosphere throughout Requiem, wherein the effects of each hit, each pill, are as palpable to the viewer as they are in the fiction on screen. We feel the inescapable doom of addiction - in the Kronos Quartet's quivering strings, Aronofsky's manipulation of pacing and claustrophobic close-ups, Connelly's mastery of the single teardrop and Burstyn's devastating deterioration into strung-out madness - and we can't help but fear it. Requiem is quite possibly the most effective anti-drug film out there; but it's neither uppers nor downers, not even heroin that ultimately scares us the most, that kills Aronofsky's imagining of the American Dream. Rather, it is the bitch that lies beneath who proves to be the truest and most terrible villain - the torturous mechanics of addiction over mind, body and soul and the degradation that its hollow rewards wreak upon all the promise of humanity. - Lauren Westerfield
2001: Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), Sexy Beast, Bastard
Don Logan is one of the few characters profiled in this feature that encompasses all three of the criteria: he's bitchy, bastardly and one hell of a badass. Throughout the superbly bizarre Sexy Beast, Logan acts childish and impetuous, bitching and snapping at all his hosts, as well as being unrelenting and imposing and finally cold, calculated and violent.
The set-up of Sexy Beast is simple- retired safecracker Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) lives in Spain with his wife and is content. His domestic bliss doesn't last long, as his old life rears its head in the form of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley). Logan has a reputation for being a man you don't say no to. Gal believes he can be reasoned with, but Logan has made his name by getting his way. Logan exhibits a childish demeanor. He is a fan of repeating himself, shouting "No" over and over again. He resorts to name-calling, insulting Gal's skin tone and weight in an effort to sway him to come back.
The most chilling moment comes when Logan argues intensely with himself over whether he is going to take Gal's answer, and Kingsley's smoldering performance explodes as Gal's bedroom door does, with Logan kicking down the last obstacle of Gal's new life. He storms into the bedroom and proceeds to brutally kick Gal awake, demanding he do the job and then a cab ride to the airport. On the plane, perhaps the most tense and humorous boarding process in history unfolds, with Logan telling a tale of being harassed by a male flight attendant that makes him a sheepish victim, thus displaying his ultimate manipulation tactic: versatility. Anyone who can be as bitchy, bastardly or badass as Don Logan deserves what he gets. - Rafael Gaitan
2002: Li'l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora), City of God, Bastard
Possibly the most bloodthirsty character in a place where blood flows like water, Li'l Ze shows his vicious mettle early in City of God, when, still known as Li'l Dice, he guns down a motel full of people while older friends are playing at robbery. Years later, running the neighborhood drug trade under a new moniker, he provides the impetus for most of the film's violence. If that early scene showed how ahead he was of his peers in terms of brutality, the rest exemplify his practiced proficiency, stirring up one situation after another, a restless whirlwind of cruelty who kills nearly everything he touches. He seems to meet his match after raping the girlfriend of Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), provoking a war which leads to the alliance of several of his enemies, but Ze's eventual death only comes at the hand of a new generation, child gangsters with no compunction about murder. His omnipresence in the narrative indirectly results in a photojournalism career for gentle protagonist Rocket, first commissioning him for portraits, later providing a career-launching photo as he lies dead in the street, an indirect allusion to how violence touches everything in the City of God. - Jesse Cataldo
2003: Oh Dae-Su (Min-sik Choi), Old Boy, Badass
Looks like a lot of the badasses we've profiled thus far did not begin as badasses; rather, they've been quite normal until forced to rise to the occasion. These characters connect with us the most because we can see ourselves in their place, forced to arm ourselves in the face of demons or killer robots from the future. Or when a stranger imprisons us for 15 years. Oldboy begins with Oh Dae-Su in his fully-formed revenge mode, complete with Phil Spector-challenging hair, holding a man by his tie over a ledge. Quickly we flash back to his less than noble origins. We don't get much of his life prior to revenge, but we get the basics: drunk, overweight, family man. The kind of life that's only given meaning when enduring Kafkaesque torture, shadowboxing for 15 years and thinking Fuck Kafka, I'm going to hit a bunch of people with a hammer until I get an answer and then it's back to the hammering. In other words, transforming into a badass.
Oh Dae-Su is just the kind of fun, crazy badass we can't help but love. Besides the tie-over-ledge scenario, the first few things he does when he gets out include stealing a woman's sunglasses and eating a live octopus. For all the style and craziness he's strangely human. When the hammering begins, Oh Dae-Su sustains some serious injuries in the process, including a knife in his shoulder. Crazy + injuries signal a quite human badass in the John McClane (pre-any of the sequels) mold. But with more crazy. Oldboy further substantiates this humanity at the end as, once the big revelation occurs, Oh Dae-Su reacts not with a wide eye and a gunshot, but by falling to the bloody floor, weeping and acting like a dog. Because badasses can transform, too. - Danny Djeljosevic
2004: The Bride (Uma Thurman), Kill Bill Vol. 2, Badass
The embodiment of steadfast vengeance in Kill Bill Vol. 1, the Bride transforms into a person right before our very eyes in the second part of Tarantino's revenge epic, from B____ K_____ (bleeped out for most of the two films, unplaceable and unknown) to Beatrix Kiddo, possessor of both a name and a past. What do we know from Vol. 1? That her former lover, Bill (David Carradine), the Charlie to her squad of Angels of death, possibly in a fit of jealous rage though very probably just out of sheer cruelty and psychopathy, has murdered her faceless fiancé and her on her wedding day, his trigger finger unflinching even when she reveals she's with child.
In the first part, she nearly gets through her whole checklist of death. Seemingly indestructible, sheer force of will has little to do with her success; she's just that good. At the halfway point of this four-hour saga of violence, the leftover body count can be kept on one hand. She has time to reflect, buried alive in a shabby wooden coffin by a former associate, she has no choice but to summon her past. We see her train, arduously, with a Shaolin master until we understand exactly how she's built up to this point, capable of punching her way out of even this situation, digging up through the dirt, un-dead. Kill Bill Vol. 2 takes place after the fever of passionate hatred has worn off, when all that's left is the job at hand, and with it a growing realization that nothing may come of it beyond some base sense of satisfaction at having gotten it done. The payoff winds up being greater than that, though, for her and for us as well. She gets her kid, as much of a survivor as she is, but we learn the true extent of her power - you can break her heart, but she'll make yours explode. - Andrei Alupului
2005: Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), A History of Violence, Badass
The two films Viggo Mortensen made with that provocative Canadian David Cronenberg, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, would make a fine badass double feature. In the former, based on a graphic novel, Tom Stall belongs to what might be called the reluctant badass category. He only kills when he has to and he does so to protect his family, his neighbors and himself. It's a character that has something in common with Clint Eastwood's William Munny in Unforgiven. Both are men with violent pasts who find some domestic peace, but are dragged back into killing and both are very good at what they do. Stall's true nature emerges in sudden, graphic fashion, as he, with the aid of a coffee pot, dispatches two killers who try to take over his diner. It turns him into a town hero, but soon mysterious, dangerous figures emerge from his past, including a one-eyed Ed Harris, who tells Stall's wife, "Ask him how come he's so good at killing people." Stall kills to preserve who he's become, but it irrevocably changes his relationship with his family and community and even unleashes something violent in his son, who stands up to a bully and puts him in the hospital. The film ends, much like a western, with the hero embracing his lethal nature, turning into angel of death and, though outnumbered and outgunned, wiping out all his enemies, including his brother. For most viewers, this was the first time they had seen Mortensen outside of his heroic, larger than life Lord of the Rings role and he inverted that image here, going darker and bloodier than most expected. At the end, he symbolically washes himself, but the suggestion is that his violent side will not easily be put aside, forever staining him and his family. - Lukas Sherman
2006: Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), Pan's Labyrinth, Bastard
Fairy tales always have the meanest villains. It makes sense as they're meant to be archetypal representations of evil, straw dogs for our heroes to overcome. Modern iterations of long-circulating tales have played this stuff down a bit, taking it easier on the kiddies of today. If, like me, you grew up on these sanitized versions, at some point in your life you must have heard for the first time that the OG Brothers Grimm joints were nasty and heavy, full of shocking brutality and cruelty. Maybe you had a hard time picturing it. Pan's Labyrinth is a perfect visual aid, decidedly on that old school tip, and Captain Vidal, our heroine's fascist evil stepfather is, even by those standards, a real son of a bitch.
If you go into Pan's Labyrinth with few expectations, its trailers in '06 emphasized the intricate art direction and fantastical setting over plot, then by the time the fascists are introduced and Captain Vidal caves an innocent man's face in with the bottom of a wine bottle without his expression so much as twitching a muscle, the shock of his violence and coldness should plow you over without warning and then stay with you. All of the film's grotesque (and really, at times, unbearable) violence can be sourced entirely to him, and to this moment. His brutality, and thus the film's, threatens to overwhelm all other aspects of it. This isn't for lack of other subject matter, it's ostensibly about a little girl uncovering a gorgeous, hidden fantasy world while seeking an escape, but Vidal's sheer force draws everything around him into his orbit of violence and the story, or at least the act of following it, is overwhelmed by the dread of his looming shadow and constant threat. - Andrei Alupului
2007: Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), No Country for Old Men, Bastard/Badass
Some cinematic characters are famed for their courage. Some are indelible for their cruelty or their charisma. Few, however, become icons simply through dint of their inhumanity. But such is the case of Anton Chigurh, the implacable antagonist of the Coen Brothers' adaptation of the legendary Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece of simplistic tension, No Country for Old Men. Less of a man than a killing impulse with self-defined, systematic rules, Chigurh has managed to become a symbol of relentless implacability through sheer will- capable of killing a person in cold blood for professionalism as for a coin toss.
A simple phrase can strike fear into the heart, but rarely can one like "What business is it of yours where I'm from... friendo?" Chigurh's ability to intimidate is not solely due to his efficiency or ruthlessness, but from his unwillingness (or inability) to operate at the same level as the rest of humanity. Where most people do things about of moral order, Chigurh operates solely out necessity to his own personal code. Whether it's purchasing a shirt off a kid to aid his broken arm, or killing a woman to fulfill a promise to a dead man, he's the kind of person that begs you wonder whether he's really one at all. - Nathan Kamal
2008: The Joker (Heath Ledger), The Dark Knight, Bastard
So much has been said about Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight; the actor's intensity in portraying who is essentially the most irrational villain of our times is undeniable. But beyond the performance, the fact that the Joker is the scariest bastard in the world must make us all shiver. As Michael Caine's Alfred stated, some men just want to see the world burn. But rationality is beyond the Joker. As Ledger plays him, with an Aberdeen smile and clown makeup, he is the perfect foil for Batman, the man who has no reason to his destruction whatsoever, a man perfectly willing to bury a bomb in a mental patient. Where Bruce Wayne is on an eternal quest of vengeance, the Joker has no motivations. No plans. No strategy. As he says, he wouldn't know what to do with a victory- he just wants to bring chaos into the world. He's the opposite of justice, the random fang in a world of pain.
And that is the most sincerely frightening thing about the Joker. There are no negotiations, nothing to try to rationalize. He's the kind of man who has nothing to lose, and knows it. - Nathan Kamal
2009: Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), In the Loop, Bastard
Is there a more lovable bastard than Malcolm Tucker, the man with an insult for every occasion? As the Prime Minister's Director of Communications in In the Loop, Tucker is responsible for ensuring that the PM's cabinet tows the party line. Which he does via insults and ludicrously violent threats. It's hard not to spend the first half of the movie loving him as he carries the movie by sheer force of will and quotability. Tucker's a verbal hitman, an enforcer sneaking around behind the scenes and shattering psyches with glorious put-downs:
"You sounded like a Nazi Julie Andrews!"
"Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!"
"You are a boring F, star, star, cunt!"
"Just fucking do it! Otherwise you'll find yourself in some medieval war zone in the Caucasus with your arse in the air, trying to persuade a group of men in balaclavas that sustained sexual violence is not the fucking way forward!"
"You stay detached, or else that's what I'll do to your retinas."
As In the Loop draws ever closer to events leading up to the invasion of the Middle East, Malcolm Tucker outsources a few insults to insults to right-hand man Jamie MacDonald, "the crossest man in Scotland," who helps Tucker reveal himself to be a true bastard by leaking a paper that gives cogent arguments against war -- doctored to leave out all the arguments against war -- as well as setting other events in motion to get the whole situation of the film tidy, which involves getting more than a few people fired.
It's a move so heinous you'll want to rent Braveheart and skip to the torture scene. - Danny Djeljosevic
[Logos: Jason Stoff]
