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Instead of Best Movie, I'll go best movies with great villains. Delicious villainy makes a movie so visceral and memorable. I'll even go so far as to rank the villainous performances. Feel free to disagree, it makes things even more fun.
DAEMANOs top 10 movies with GREAT villains
10. No Country for Old Men - Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) - Amoral never seemed to make so much sense.
9. Cape Fear - Max Cady (Robert Deniro) - Crazy in a real kind of way that turns the stomach.
8.Training Day - Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) - Never more quotable than this out of control archetypal cop born bad.
7. Casino - Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) - Out quoted Harris above to become one of the most intense villains ever depicted.
6. There Will Be Blood - Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) - Took Gordon Gecko's "greed is good" line to the next level, then topped that. Nearly non-fiction in it's depiction of greed in capitalism.
5. The Last of the Mohicans - Magua (Wes Studi) - Revenge personified. Evil. A force of nature. Magua just kept coming with the laser focus of a ravenous apex predator.
4. The Silence of the Lambs - Hannibal Lecter - (Anthony Hopkins) - More impossibly manipulative than any character filmed. LittleFinger studied the manual, but couldn't truly understand it. Shout out to GoT and Crouching Tiger.
3. The Dark Knight - The Joker (Heath Ledger) - Complete immersion in the character ended up creating this unsubtle yet nuanced wrecking ball of chaos. Words couldn't do this justice. He made this movie great by sheer willpower.
2. Gangs of New York - Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis) - The method acting master single-handedly rescued this film from its' schmaltzy love story and elevated his scenes to some of the greatest ever filmed. Bill is terrifying every time he shows up and, like Ledger's Joker, hangs like a dark shadow over scenes he isn't in.
1. Die Hard - Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) - No villian ever seemed more in control and ahead of every institution of order as Hans Gruber. He used the press, mocked the president of a multinational corporations, ignored the LAPD, and toyed with the FBI simultaneously en route to his end. There were no problems for Hans... except... you know who. My mind is blown thinking this was Rickman's big screen debut. He owned this character and movie with the nuanced performance of a lifetime. Without Rickman's Gruber there is no blockbuster Die Hard and in turn, no Bruce Willis' A-List career. So quotable. "Mr. Takagi won't be joining us for the rest of his life." So wickedly funny. Now everyone, shoot the glass for Alan Rickman and go watch Die Hard.
Bonus...
Gladiator - Commodus (Joakin Phoenix) - The guy deserved the name that eventually came to mean toilet.
Bonus Bonus... Non-humans
Alien(s) - The Alien
Jaws - The Shark
Terminator - T800 (The Governator)
Terminator 2 - T1000 (Robert Patrick)
Star Wars ep 3-6 - Darth Vader (humanoid)
Star Wars ep 1 - Darth Maul (another humanoid)
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