It’s hard to think that a protagonist can actually be worse than the antagonist in a movie, as it’s just not supposed to happen. Right? The unfortunate truth though is that sometimes the protagonist just isn’t as good or as noble as one might like to think and is bound and determined to stay alive in the movie. You can’t really blame the character, one because that’s they way they were written in, and when thinking about real life it’s easy to think that most people would do their absolute best to stay alive since that’s one of the main goals of any living, sentient creature, to remain alive no matter what it takes. It’s already been proven throughout history that people will do whatever they can to get their way and will do what it takes to keep their heart beating. It’s a reality that morally bankrupts some folks to be fair but it’s also a prime directive of any living being that has to be actively worked against in order to ignore it. In the movies this is almost never ignored since the heroes/survivors of the final confrontation are supposed to live, right? They’re supposed to be happy and satisfied as the natural order states, so this is what tends to happen quite often.
Here are a few times when the heroes were worse than the villains in the movies.
5. Ferris Bueller – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
It’s true that Ferris was the kind of person that everyone wanted to be since he knew how to have fun and just have a good time. But once we get past the good feelings and happy times we get to see a young man that would likely be mooching and charming his way through life since he didn’t exactly take his school years seriously. Almost everyone in high school can say that they’d love to take off a day here and there, but while Rooney was a jerk and more often than not out to get a kid here and there, Ferris was a manipulator and without a doubt a cheat when it came to maneuvering his way around the system. But yeah, people wanted to be like him.
4. Dana Polk – The Cabin in the Woods
You could put Marty into this category as well, and you could say that neither of them is really at fault for releasing the old gods that would eventually go on to destroy the earth since they didn’t know. But the same people that like to say that ignorance is no excuse are those that would likely say that Dana and Marty should have sacrificed themselves not to appease the old gods, but to ensure that the world would still be there in the morning since some towering, bloodthirsty titans buried beneath the earth wanted their tribute. Sometimes there is such a thing as the greater good and if you’re already dying, why not?
3. The Drifter – High Plains Drifter
Let’s put this in a hierarchal order here, the town toughs that were shot when the drifter was getting a shave were just stupid, the guys that ran the town of Lago were just crooked and inept, and the three criminals were angry because they’d been sold up the river and wanted a bit of payback. True, they did kill the marshall in the street, but the drifter raped a woman, no matter that she was a horrible person, and he forced himself on another woman, and kicked people out of the hotel, and forced everyone to paint the town red, and humiliated pretty much everyone before letting the criminals ransack the town and abuse the people. Walking it all back he did so like a spirit of vengeance so a lot of people find it difficult to argue with him, including me. But I still would father fend off three bullwhips than tangle with the drifter.
2. Porter – Payback
Funny story, Porter actually IS the bad guy in this movie or one of them at least. He’s a crook that gets cheated out of his money and almost killed after his wife and his partner doublecross him and make off with the score. The reason he’s the hero is because he’s taking out the other bad guys since they don’t listen to him and keep getting the amount of money he wanted back wrong. The less they listen, the more he kills, and the more he kills, the angrier they get until finally, they decide to go hard on him, at which point he pulls the ultimate doublecross and wipes out his enemies, at that time, in one fell swoop.
1. Tyler Durden – Fight Club
Why is Tyler worse than Tyler? That’s a good one really since the fact is that Tyler is a bit messed up in the head, to say the least. The fact that his imaginary self is worse than he is comes largely from the fact that the imaginary Tyler is everything that he’s been repressing, everything he’s wanted to do or say for so long. The reason he’s so much worse is that when he’s playing his imaginary self, he has no filter.
It is possible for the hero to be worse than the villain, from a certain point of view.
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