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Mike Leigh's darkest creation is a work-shy drifter who drowns out his own self-hatred with meaningless sexual encounters and relentless bullying of his intellectual inferiors. Somehow, we still love him:"Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody—you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it; you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it; you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it; so now you want cheap thrills and plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in 40 fuckin' different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored."
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Bad guys are typically creatures of want, craving everything over the course of their disgusting lives from revenge and money to helicopters, rings of power, and the indiscriminate slaughter of Jedi younglings. But sometimes, all a rotter needs is some cake and the finest wines available to humanity. Richard E. Grant's Withnail may not be a villain in the strictest sense, but you'd be hard pressed to argue he isn't a bully, coward, misanthrope and self-pitying wretch.
His last scene performing Hamlet to a pair of disinterested wolves at London Zoo is genuinely tragic. "What a piece of work is a man!" he says ruefully from under an umbrella in the rain. Cheer up, mate—at least you didn't top yourself, like Bruce Robinson originally envisioned in his unpublished novel of the same name.
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When he's not busy plunging half of California into drought, Noah Cross is the kind of guy who likes to kick back with a spot of incestual child abuse. His mea culpa regarding the rape of his own daughter is evil incarnate, revealing the true end-game of his senseless greed."I don't blame myself," he tells Jack Nicholson's private dick Jake Gittes. "You see, Mr Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything."John Huston's performance as Noah Cross was echoed by Daniel Day Lewis more than 30 years later as…DANIEL PLAINVIEW IN THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Right wingers. All horrible evil baddies, right? I tend to think so, too. But Jack Nicholson's endlessly parodied speech ("You can't handle the truth!") as a Navy colonel in the dock has me welling up like George Osborne at Maggie Thatcher's funeral. Chalk that one up to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who—with one beautifully weighted monologue—gifts us a three-dimensional baddie to stalk the dreams of hand-wringing liberals for years:
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Forty-odd years after his creation, HAL still sets the gold-standard in sci-fi robot villainy. The crew of the Discovery One pulls the plug on their monotonously voiced computer after he tries to bump them off for reasons unknown—but that doesn't make powering him down any less traumatic: "I'm afraid… I'm afraid, Dave."
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