Negative Creeps: 10 Best Unlikeable Movie Antiheroes
Long before TV became the go-to medium for tortured, flawed lead characters, the movies were the place to find your primo antiheroes: Thirties gangsters, Forties noir-dwelling private dicks, Fifties non-conformists, Sixties loonies, Seventies loners and loose cannons, Eighties tough guys, and Nineties ironist rebels. And with a few notable exceptions (say hello, Sweet Smell of Success‘ Sidney Falco), even when these characters had a wobbly moral compass or did despicable things, they were incredibly charismatic. Maybe you admired their confidence, their coolness, or simply their ability to stand up to authority or thumb their nose at society. Maybe you just wanted to be them, the James Dean greaser and Jack Nicholson smart-ass, Dirty Harry and Alex the Droog.
But there are a small number of memorable screen antiheroes that you wouldn’t exactly call admirable. Antisocial, stalkerish, creepy, sniveling, disturbed or downright psychotic — those descriptions fit a lot better. These were guys, and they were almost always guys, who you didn’t want to sit down with for a beer; you were more likely to cross the street or change zip codes in order to avoid them altogether. Someone like Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Nightcrawler, an Angeleno who stumbles across his calling as freelance TV news cameraman. His specialty is car accidents and crime scenes, though he’s not afraid to cross a few lines (legal, ethical, you name it) to get the edge on his competition. He’s also the kind of sociopathic protagonist who gives you the serious heebie-jeebies — and this is the person you’re supposed to be rooting for.
Gyllenhaal’s malevolent misfit is just the latest in a long line of lead characters who make you want to crawl out of your skin, however. So we’ve put together a quick survey of our favorite unlikable antiheroes — not the villains you love to hate or hate to love, but the “hero” characters most likely to cause mass cringing. We’re keeping the list confined to characters from American movies; you could fill a similar list several times over with just Japanese- or French-film characters if you were so inclined, and don’t even get us started on Austria’s recent wave of unsparing feel-bad dramas. Rather, we focused on 10 memorable gents from Hollywood/Indiewood circles who still make us want to take a steel-wool shower afterwards: the crème de la crème of our cinema’s negative creeps.
-
Mark Zuckerberg (‘The Social Network,’ 2010)
Yes, the Mark Zuckerberg we meet in David Fincher's epic ode to These Internet Times is supposedly nothing like the real billionaire, and Aaron Sorkin's script takes beaucoup liberties with the site's origin story. But as played to on-the-spectrum perfection by Jesse Eisenberg, the movie version of the former Ivy League student who struck Silicon Valley gold is one contemptuous, class-envying mess. He knows he's the smartest person in the room and can't help but lord it over everybody else; even if you admire the shrewdness of this boy genius, you recoil at how he radiates passive-aggressive hate towards business partners, best friends, ex-flames and seemingly 99 percent of the human race. That's the great irony of the film and performance: The dude who virtually invented modern social networking is the most antisocial oddball of them all.
-
Graham Dalton (‘Sex, Lies and Videotape,’ 1989)
We may take James Spader's signature brand of alpha-creepiness as a given in today's post-Blacklist age, but back in 1989, we had no idea just how potent his vaguely perverse, semi-icky persona would become. (All he needs to do now is show up, fix his dead-eyed stare on somebody and say one line in that bored-by-humanity monotone, and the hairs go up on your arms.) It's impossible to think of Steven Soderbergh's gamechanging indie movie without Spader's take on Dalton, a character who edges toward getting viewers' sympathy yet stops short of actually gaining it. Most actors would have played him as pathetic and openly needy, but still good at heart; Spader uses his boy-next-door good looks and blank affectations to make him seem hollow, jaded, debauched — anything but easily likeable. This is a guy who tapes women talking about sex so he can get it off to it later and not have to deal with messy things like emotional attachment or other people. And the way Spader blithely says "Nothing I can't finish later" when he's "interrupted" telegraphs just how profoundly fucked up this guy really is.
-
Patrick Bateman (‘American Psycho,’ 2000)
Imagine every unattractive aspect of the go-go Eighties — the greed, the me-first materialism, the narcissism — stuffed into one trim, super-attractive package. Now imagine this same hot-bod embodiment of corporate success being the ultimate sociopath. Filmmaker Mary Harron managed to locate the razor-sharp satire of the late Reagan era that novelist Bret Easton Ellis had buried under his Grand Guignol prose, but credit goes to Christian Bale for making Patrick Bateman a first-rate sick fuck, turning a white-collar master of the universe into "murders and executions" (and analyzing Huey Lewis songs) into the most soulless wonder on Wall Street. "I simply am not there," he says. If it wasn't for the skin-care regiments and the carnage, he wouldn't even know that he existed at all.
-
Roger Greenberg (‘Greenberg,’ 2010)
Once upon a time — a.k.a. the Nineties — Roger Greenberg had it all: youth, hipster cachet, an alt-rock band on the verge of a major-label deal and assured 120 Minutes rotation. Then he threw it all away, because damned if he was going to, like, sell out. Now, he mopes around the smoggy hills and valleys of L.A., a middle-aged misanthrope destined to make everyone around him miserable. Ben Stiller made a name for himself playing hapless everyguys and romcom underdogs, but anyone who's seen his sketch-comedy work on The Ben Stiller Show knows the guy can do a mean aggressive jerk. Here, he proves he can play a passive prick as well, drifting through life and refusing to admit where it all went wrong.
-
Kit Carruthers (‘Badlands,’ 1973)
With his James Dean sense of style (dig how he slings that rifle over his shoulders like he's Jett Rink) and photogenic pout, Martin Sheen's Fifties drifter makes for a much more romantic figure than his real-life counterpart, serial killer Charles Starkweather. But movie-star handsome or not, Kit Carruthers is chilling even at his warmest, and the longer you follow him and his teenage girlfriend as they go on a murder spree throughout middle America, the more you feel like you're peering into the emotional equivalent of a black hole. Even the extreme politeness he shows to his victims feels eerie and predatory. Like Springsteen, who used the Starkweather case as the basis for the title track of Nebraska, filmmaker Terence Malick saw something in this notorious true-crime story that reflected a certain disconnect in the nation's character; when he was still doing interviews, the director said that he wanted Badlands to be "set up like a fairy tale." For Sissy Spacek's Holly, Kit is Prince Charming. For the rest of us, he's a better-looking version of the Big Bad Wolf.
-
Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint (‘The Usual Suspects,’ 1995)
Forget, for a second, that our man Kint may not be all that he's cracked up to be; until Bryan Singer's breakthrough movie decides to drop a bombshell, Kevin Spacey's shuffling, sniveling low-life is the runt of the movie's criminal litter. Remember that Jon Lovitz character "Annoying Man" from Saturday Night Live? Verbal is like a kinder, gentler version of that guy, the sort of person who irritates people simply by taking up space — and next to Gabriel Byrne's former cop-turned-crook, he's the closest thing we have to an audience surrogate among the colorful thieves and cantankerous detectives. Spacey has always shown a knack for playing unnerving (see Seven) but his disabled con man is just uncomfortable enough in his skin to suggest a he's nothing more than a bottom feeder, someone you don't want to be around or pay attention to. It's a great performance, in more ways than one.
-
Rupert Pupkin (‘The King of Comedy,’ 1982)
For every person who makes it in showbiz, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of would-be stars who don't get past the audition room, the casting agent's office or the security guard at the studio gate. Rupert Pupkin is determined to be one of the few stand-up comics who does make it — so what if he's not that talented or funny? He's got tenacity and the will to succeed. Also, if his idol, a Johnny Carson-ish late-night TV show host, won't give him a chance, he's prepared to proceed directly to Plan B. Martin Scorsese's devastating cringe-comedy about becoming a celebrity by any means necessary seems to get more and more pertinent every year, as people continue to claw their way to their 15 minutes of fame. Robert De Niro's portrayal of Pupkin, however, would be brilliant even if we didn't live in age of constant spotlight jockeying; it's a symphony of pushiness, entitlement, aggression, humiliation, delusions, denial, and, ultimately, violence. He's a classic have-not, throwing out bad punchlines to cardboard cut-outs in his basement. Give him stardom, or give him death.
-
Daniel Plainview (‘There Will Be Blood,’ 2007)
"I have a competition in me," says the "hero" of Paul Thomas Anderson's autopsy on the self-made American man. "I want no else to succeed." Daniel Plainview is an oil man by trade, and he's willing to lie, cheat and steal to corner the Southern California market in the early-ish part of the 20th century. He's less consumed by greed, however, than just sheer hate — for himself, for others, for the whole stinking human race he's reluctantly found himself to part of. Daniel Day Lewis fully commits himself to playing this rugged individualist as both a ruthless capitalist and a bitter, blackhearted man. Any act of friendliness is simply a ploy to get what he wants or to keep you from getting what you want. He'd just as soon stab you with a steak knife as look at you. He will drink your milkshake.
-
Norman Bates (‘Psycho,’ 1960)
You could argue that Norman Bates, enterprising young hospitality entrepreneur and first-class mama's boy, is the villain of Alfred Hitchcock's horror masterpiece, and that he's not an antihero at all. But once Janet Leigh steps into film history's most famous shower, ask yourself: who do you most identify with? Martin Balsam's detective? John Gavin's spurned boyfriend? Possibly Vera Miles' concerned sister? It's part of the warped genius of Hitchcock's movie that it makes you actually side with Bates, despite the fact that he's a peeping Tom, an odd duck and, well, someone with a few issues regarding his dear old ma. (Although to be fair, a boy's best friend is his mother.) Anthony Perkins essentially set the standard for characters that repulse you and inexplicably still have you hoping they get away with murder. Modern cinematic creepiness starts with Norman — even if he wouldn't even hurt a fly.
-
Travis Bickle (‘Taxi Driver,’ 1976)
If you had to pinpoint the one true screen ancestor of Nightcrawler's awkward, several-beats-off central character, it would be the ticking timebomb skulking through Martin Scorsese's urban nightmare — the original "God's lonely man." Whether it was something that happened in 'Nam (his history as a veteran is alluded to) or simply the psychic cost of living in "Horror City" New York that pushed Travis Bickle to the edge, he's clearly an antihero who radiates repressed rage and the sense that something has short-circuited in his skull. Robert De Niro radiates an outsider mentality from the get-go, seemingly befuddled by social norms (like, say, not detouring a first date into a porno theater) and the bad, bad things coursing through his brain. "Taxi Driver is about a man racked by dark feelings," Scorsese has said. "It's unfortunate that some people act them out." If Jake Gyllenhaal's character in Nightcrawler finds his calling through lensing dead bodies, then Bickle eventually discovers his reason for living is to cause death, in the form of some sort of avenging angel of Avenue A. The justly famous scene of him acting out his fantasies of violence — "You talkin' to me?" — is scary as hell because we recognize it. You would never call Travis Bickle likeable. You would, however, call him familiar.