Movies are all about watching the protagonist of a story embark on a quest of adventure and self-discovery. In order to keep audiences hooked for the entire journey, the protagonist needs to be likable and have sympathetic motivations. Most of the time. But not all of the time. Enter the anti-hero, that rare class of protagonists who find interesting ways to actively alienate their audiences.
Anti-heroes have been a time-honored tradition of cinema. They can often commit questionable actions for selfish reasons, yet there is something very relatable about them. Sometimes its not so much about being an anti-hero, but being forced into a position that requires morally-challenging decision making. Let us take a look at some movies that feature such main characters who expertly mess with the audience's sympathies.
10 Oldboy
Filmmaker Park Chan-Wook was at the forefront of the "Korean Wave" that brought so much international attention to his country's film industry. And it was all thanks in large part to the filmmaker's game-changing 2003 neo-noir thriller Oldboy, based on a Japanese Manga series of the same name. The film follows the story of a man named Oh Dae-su, who has been locked up in a cell for 15 years.
With no knowledge of the reason behind his imprisonment, all Dae-su has to help him get through the days is cultivating a burning hatred for his captors. When Dae-su is unexpectedly released from his prison one day, he sets off on a quest to discover the identity of his captors, and why they put him through such torture. What starts out as a mission of vengeance soon turns into something much more complicated, as Dae-su's own past becomes a part of the equation, leading to an explosive finale that leaves the story with no heroes or villains, only victims.
9 Fight Club
Fight Club is a movie with many layers, each more grimy than the last. We start with an unnamed protagonist who has trouble finding meaning in life. He meets a charismatic individual named Tyler Durden, who shows the protagonist that there can be no true value to a life that is designed to be safe and comfortable in every way.
The two seemingly embark on a mission to give meaning to the lives of middle-class men with their titular "Fight Club." But things soon turn sinister when Tyler reveals his deeper ambitions. What started out as a way of self-expression through violence turns into an attempt to spread anarchy instead. Audience sympathies tend to yo-yo between the hapless protagonist and the overwhelmingly charismatic Tyler, until one of the greatest twist endings in film history leaves the audience floored and wondering whom to pin the blame on for the chaos that ensues.
8 Captain America: Civil War
Disney
The MCU is not really known for moral complexity. When the heroes are supermodel-looking billionaires, deities and soldiers, and the villains are alien monstrosities looking to destroy entire planets, it's pretty easy to know where the audiences' sympathy should lie. But Captain America: Civil War does something different by turning the conflict inward.
In the face of new UN rules dictating their actions, the Avengers find themselves a house divided. Iron Man wants to turn the superheroes into officially-sanctioned government watchdogs, while Captain America believes the Avengers need to stay independent and continue to operate beyond government boundaries. Things get even more murky when the involvement of the Winter Soldier forces Steve Rogers to ask a faction of the heroes to break the law and go against Tony Stark's allies, leading to an explosive conflict that has audiences arguing over whether they are Team Cap or Team Iron Man.
7 Memento
Memento was the first movie Christopher Nolan made for a big studio, and the feature quickly gathered acclaim as one of the best thrillers of the 2000s. The film stars Guy Ritchie as Leonard Shelby, a man who suffers from a form of amnesia where his memory gets wiped after fifteen minutes. Leonard's condition is the result of an attack on his home that left him in the hospital and his wife dead.
Thus, the deeply stricken man embarks on a mission of vengeance against his wife's killers, working off clues he has gathered in his journal and various body tattoos that constantly remind Leonard of his medical condition and life's purpose. In typical Nolan fashion, the movie plays around with a non-linear narrative that shows Leonard's life before and after a major incident. When both timelines finally converge, the entire story gets upended in the most dramatic fashion, turning Leonard from a tragic hero into something much sadder and horrifying.
6 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film was a classic adventure movie about a clash between the forces of good and evil. The one outlier was disgraced pirate Captain Jack Sparrow. Audiences were always on edge with Jack's actions, which oscillated between selfish and selfless, or villainous and heroic. By the time of the sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the morality of the series had followed Jack off the deep end.
Now even noble characters like Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann started acting in ways more befitting pirates than heroes. The movie sees most of the main cast double-crossing each other and lying to everyone to achieve their goals, showing that Jack has had a corrupting influence on most of the main characters. Each hero wants the heart of the magical villain Davy Jones for their own reasons, leaving audience divided over who to root for in the battle against Jones, the Kraken, and the British Navy.
5 Badlapur
Sriram Raghavan is one of the best filmmakers of the thriller genre working in Bollywood today. Raghavan's mainstream breakout success came with 2015's Badlapur, which, apart from being the name of the town where the film's story takes place, also literally translates to "Revenge Town." As the name suggests, the film is about one man's twisted quest to get vengeance at all cost. Raghav was planning to start a family with his girlfriend-turned-wife Misha and their son Robin.
But the plans are torn asunder when Misha and Robin are abducted by a couple of rogue bank thieves and shot dead. Raghav can only watch from afar as one of the thieves, Liaq, is caught by the police and jailed. Raghav feels nothing but a burning desire to make Liaq pay. While Liaq starts to reform in jail, Raghav goes off the deep end in hunting down Liaq's associates, committing a number of crimes that turn him into a monster with little hope of redemption. Things take a turn for the worse when Liaq gets released from jail, and must contend with his and Raghav's shared past.
4 Thoroughbreds
Anya Taylor-Joy has established a reputation for playing complex, morally-grey characters. Yet none of the other characters in her filmography are grayer than Lily, one of the two main characters in the 2017 black comedy thriller Thoroughbreds. Lily is a gifted student and a popular member of her school, who used to be friends with Amanda, a girl her own age who claims that she is unable to experience emotions like happiness or empathy.
After spending years apart, Amanda and Lily become friendly again in high school, when Lily finds an outlet for her emotions in revealing to Amanda her troubled home life with her abusive step father. Amanda hits upon the solution of killing Lily's stepdad, and after some hesitation the latter agrees. Thus begins a twisted tale of murder which lays bare Lily and Amanda's true nature and the steps they would take to have a perfect life.
3 The Suicide Squad
James Gunn has made a career out of telling stories about unlikable characters, and none are more unlikeably likable than the members of The Suicide Squad. The film deals with a group of convicted killers and thieves who are offered the chance to get years commuted off their sentence in return for performing an undercover operation for the US government on foreign soil.
As the troupe of supervillains try to get through the plan without killing each other or alerting the enemy, the true nature of the mission unfolds, and wheels within wheels of government intrigue get exposed. It is difficult to get behind anyone in the movie who has not done terrible things in their lives, so the story becomes a matter of watching terrible people killing even more terrible people on the orders of the worst people of the lot.
2 Revenge of the Nerds
There was a time when 1984's Revenger of the Nerds was considered a good old fashioned comedy about good vs. evil. The bad guys were the rich jocks who ruled their college and mercilessly mocked anyone whom they did not consider "cool," while the good guys were the decidedly uncool "nerds" who studied at the same college, and suffered under the tyranny of the jocks until one day deciding to rise up and revolt.
Unfortunately, the nature of the revolt has in recent years come under heavy internet scrutiny, showing the actions of the nerds as sexually perverted and misogynistic to say the least. Like the scene where a nerd named Lewis has intercourse with a jock's girlfriend while pretending to be the jock. The scene has caused so much controversy in modern times that the film's director Jeff Kanew and writer Steve Zacharias have gone on record stating that they regret including the scene in the movie.
1 Joker
When you set out to make a movie about the most famous super villain in history, you can bet you're going to end up with a protagonist who can be described as "morally ambiguous" at best. 2019's Joker puts a new spin on the origin story of the Clown Prince of Crime. In an unnamed year in Gotham, decades before the arrival of the Batman, a lonely comedian named Arthur Fleck ekes out a meager living dressing up as a clown.
Arthur dreams of becoming a famous comedian. But his sickly mother, their poverty-stricken lives, and Arthur's own undiagnosed mental issues make such dreams an impossibility. After getting crushed again and again by an uncaring society, Arthur begins a descent into madness that threatens to take the entire city of Gotham down with him. Lines are drawn. Riots erupt. And from the broken husk of Arthur Fleck, the Mad Jester emerges to laugh at the chaos surrounding him.
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