15 Movies Where Every Character Is A Villain

Gone Girl looks at what happens in a marriage when both partners are terrible human beings. The movie takes us into the relationship between Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck). They once promised to love each other "for better or for worse," but it's mostly just become the "worse" part. Of course, if you've seen the film, you know that Amy goes missing, making Nick the prime suspect in an intense police investigation. How miserable are these people? Well, he kind of hopes some horrible fate really has befallen her, while she, it turns out, staged her own disappearance in order to get him in trouble with the law. These two make the central couple in The War of the Roses look tame in comparison.

Don't Breathe is a thriller with a nifty twist. Three young people in need of money decide to rob the home of a blind veteran who supposedly received a ton of money from a wrongful death settlement. They break in, thinking the job will be a breeze. However, the guy (played by Stephen Lang) figures out intruders have entered his home. He shuts off the power while the trio is in the basement, leaving them as sightless as he is. The only difference is that he knows his way around, whereas they don't. In real life, someone like the blind man would simply call the police. In this case, however, he reveals a sadistic side, siccing his dog on the intruders and proudly brandishing a weapon. Later, there's a revelation that he's got a woman bound and gagged in the house. That, and what follows, is a game-changer. We're rooting for him at first, and then suddenly, we're not rooting for him at all. He's even worse than the young would-be burglars.

Nightcrawler is a searing indictment of American media, specifically its tendency to sensationalize tragedy. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a petty crook who buys a camcorder and follows police and ambulance calls throughout Los Angeles, hoping to sell his graphic footage to TV news stations. At one point, he even enters a crime scene in order to get some "juicy" footage. Riz Ahmed plays his assistant, and Rene Russo is the local news producer more than happy to pony up the cash for his recordings. There truly is no one heroic in Nightcrawler. The film suggests that there are plenty of leeches in the world willing to exploit the tragedies of others to make a fast buck. Just as bad, there are also plenty of news outlets looking to bump up viewership or readership via the most exploitative means available. The movie takes an in-depth look at how that sick dynamic works in today's society.

Incredibly desperate people often fall into the trap of doing things that are inadvisable in order to get themselves out of bad situations. Pain & Gain is filled with such characters. Mark Wahlberg stars as Daniel, a Miami personal trainer who wants to become the kind of person who pays for services rather than someone who gets paid to provide them. He hatches a plan to extort money from a wealthy client. Helping him out are two fellow bodybuilders. Adrian (Anthony Mackie) is a steroid abuser and Paul (Dwayne Johnson) is a recent parolee with a substance problem. The three succeed in extorting the client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), but he's not exactly what you'd call an "innocent" target. Kershaw vows revenge against the trio, putting the wheels in motion to make that happen. Stuff gets gruesome from there. Pain & Gain is not what anyone would call a subtle movie. It does, however, show the hideous lengths people will go to in order to gain - or hold on to - wealth.

From the beginning of his career, Quentin Tarantino has had a fascination with wrongdoer types. In The Hateful Eight, he presents an entire pack of them. Samuel L. Jackson plays a bounty hunter snowed in at a lodge during a winter storm. Also stuck there is a fellow bounty hunter (Kurt Russell), his fugitive (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former Confederate general (Bruce Dern), and several additional shady types. Jackson's character comes to believe that someone in the group is planning to knock off all the others in order to help the female fugitive escape. This sets off a wave of paranoia among the group. Distrust runs rampant, leading to shocking - and sometimes unwarranted - acts of violence against one another. When suspicions fester and grow, none of the story's inhabitants can be counted on to act morally. And none do.

In the comedy Very Bad Things, a group of guys hire an exotic dancer for a bachelor party. One of them accidentally kills the woman, and when a security guard discovers her body, another member of the group offs him. The buddies then concoct a plan to cut the cadavers into pieces and inter them in the desert. The stress of the situation ends up pitting the men against each other. What can we say? It's called Very Bad Things for a reason. You might think that the bride would be the one sympathetic character in the movie. Nope. Played by Cameron Diaz, she grows angry upon learning what the guys did because it threatens to ruin her special day. In fact, she demands the wedding proceed as if nothing happened. Literally every single major character in this dark comedy is someone you wouldn't want to meet in real life.

American Hustle gets its name because all the characters in it are con artists to one degree or another. Christian Bale and Amy Adams play scammers who are also in a relationship. They're busted by an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) during a sting and are forced to work for him setting up other people. One of their prime targets is the mayor (Jeremy Renner) of Camden, NJ, a guy willing to illegally cut corners in order to revitalize Atlantic City. The gist of the movie is that everyone is conning everyone else, pretty much all the time. None of them can be trusted, which makes allegiances difficult. Jennifer Lawrence co-stars as the wife Bale's character won't leave, and even she has her own form of grift. She gets flirty with the FBI agent as retaliation for her husband's dalliance. Entertainment value comes from watching all of these deceitful individuals mess with one another. We may not like any of them, but they sure are fun to observe.

Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels tells the story of four friends who get in over their heads after playing a high-stakes poker game with a crime lord. He cheats and they lose, meaning that they have to come up with half a million pounds in just a week, or else terrible things will happen. Their solution is to rob some people they know who have just robbed local dealers. That's right - they pilfer from other crooks. Everything gets seriously wild from there. The wit and style Ritchie brings to the movie earned it largely positive reviews from critics, as well as a faithful cult audience. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels has fun pitting various crooks against each other. No one in the film is particularly moral or honest, which appears to be exactly the way Ritchie likes it.

Ben Wheatley's Free Fire takes place inside a warehouse. Two rival groups meet to carry out a black market arms deal. As is often the case with crooks, tensions flare, and before long, everyone is discharging weapons at everyone else. Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, and Cillian Murphy star in this no-holds-barred ballet of bloody violence. All of the characters are bad people, and putting them together in the same location brings out the worst in them. Free Fire truly doesn't need to have a hero because the overall goal is to look at crime and the mindset behind it. Of course, one of the benefits in this case is that viewers genuinely don't know who will survive until the end since there's no obvious good guy.

Not only are all the characters in The Bling Ring villains, but they're also based on real people who actually did what occurs in the movie. It's about a group of fame-obsessed teens who use social media to figure out when stars like Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, and Orlando Bloom aren't home, then go and rob their houses. Underneath this behavior is a sense of entitlement. They want the same luxuries the stars have, so they just go and take them. None see anything particularly wrong with their behavior. They even post pictures of the ill-gotten items online. Late in the film, one member of the group rats on all the others. He's mostly just trying to save his own skin, though. In the end, everyone receives some kind of punishment, including jail time, for the thefts. The Bling Ring ends with a scene in which another member of the group appears to take pride in the notoriety her actions provided. No lessons learned here.

In the 2020 thriller Fatale, Michael Ealy plays Derrick, a wealthy and successful businessman. While in Vegas for a bachelor party, he cheats on his wife with Valerie (Hilary Swank), a stranger he picks up in a bar. After returning home to LA, someone breaks into his house and tries to harm him. The detective assigned to the case is - you guessed it - Valerie. She has every intention of making him pay for running off the morning after their fling. She takes many of her cues from Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Both main characters in Fatale are people who do bad things. The same goes for the supporting characters. Derrick's wife is also unfaithful. She's having an affair with his business partner/best friend. And those two have a scheme to take the business right out from under him. It's a sign of how despicable everyone in the movie is that we're actually supposed to root for the guy who's unfaithful to his wife and dismissive of his mistress.

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill saga is all about vengeance. Uma Thurman plays "the Bride," a former assassin looking to get even with her ex-boss/lover, Bill (David Carradine). He attempted to kill her on the day of her wedding, thus depriving her of what was supposed to be a happy event. She additionally lost her unborn child in the process. To get to Bill, the Bride first has to go through his other assassins. The movie absolutely establishes valid reasons why the Bride would want revenge, and the people she takes out are unrepentantly evil. That said, she herself was an assassin at one point, and therefore, not exactly anyone's idea of a wonderful person. She certainly doesn't hold back from dispatching her enemies in the most severe ways possible. Although not traditionally heroic, we do root for the Bride, simply because we know Bill and the others are even worse.

The Neon Demon is an interesting case, because it starts off seeming as though it will have a heroic character, only to defy our expectations. Elle Fanning plays Jesse, an aspiring 16-year-old model who moves to Los Angeles. Other models in her work circle despise her for her youth and natural beauty. She ends up doing a photo shoot for a fashion designer who cruelly mocks women who have plastic surgery, so he's no nicer. We feel for Jesse initially, but after some bizarre hallucinations, she turns into a narcissistic creep. Any charm she may have had abruptly dissipates as her star rises. Jesse certainly gets her comeuppance when the other models kill her and then literally consume her. Presumably, The Neon Demon is a metaphor for the "eat or get eaten" world of modeling, where competitiveness can be taken to whole new levels.

Ex Machina stars Oscar Isaac as Nathan Bateman, the CEO of a tech company who believes he has perfected artificial intelligence. He invites his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to his isolated home to test whether his creation, Ava (Alicia Vikander), is sufficiently human-like. One of the movie's major themes is that, to be completely authentic, AI would have to replicate the bad parts of human beings, in addition to the good. For that reason, all the characters have fundamental flaws alongside their positive traits. Nathan reveals the kind of dark, narcissistic side that comes from playing God, Caleb attempts to ruin his boss's work by setting Ava free, and Ava herself blatantly manipulates Caleb so that she can escape. The whole point of Ex Machina is that artificial intelligence can only truly be achieved when computers are taught how to be as morally complex as their human counterparts.

Hard Candy is by and large a two-character film. Patrick Wilson plays Jeff, a 32-year-old photographer who likes to hang around internet chat rooms filled with adolescent girls. Elliot Page is Hayley, the 14-year-old girl he arranges to meet in real life. Obviously, it would be a vast understatement to say Jeff is a sleazy guy. He's a flat-out predator. In the film's provocative twist, Hayley gets the upper hand on him, tying him down and threatening to - shall we say - pivotally deform him. The teen is sure to play plenty of mind games with him while she's at it. What makes Hard Candy so disturbing is that you can't quite root for either character. Jeff has clearly earned what's coming, but Hayley takes such glee in giving it to him that we wonder if she's secretly enjoying the chance to torment this guy.