The Problem With Blockbusters, Part 3

Problem #3: Where's the villainy?


Every good blockbuster needs a good villain. No, scratch that - every good blockbuster has a great villain. A great villain isn't just a faceless nobody. A great villain has personality. A great villain is (often, but not always) a dark mirror of the protagonist. A great villain  can take the hero's quips and toss them right back, and terrorize  the audience, even as we can't wait to see what they'll do next.

A great villain makes a movie memorable, and they help define the protagonist by virtue of their villainy.  John McClane has Hans Gruber. Batman has the Joker (in two excellent and wildly different incarnations). Sarah Conner has the Terminator. Neo has Agent Smith. Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader (who is pretty much the template for an amazing villain).

But lately, big blockbusters have been sorely lacking in the villain department. 

Sometimes it's because they have no personality, nothing to make them unique. They're generic to the point of being caricatures or clichés. 

Sometimes it's because their villainous motives are muddy, and their characters are ill-defined. 

Sometimes it's because they're not actually good at being bad. 

Sometimes it's because they're just. Not. Scary.

Take Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. He's the almost-but-not-quite exception to this list. The film-makers tried really hard to make Khan cool and scary and complex, and Bendedict Cumberbatch delivered the charm and menace with his typical aplomb. But the Khan of J.J. Abrams' movie was nowhere near as compelling as Ricardo Montalban's iconic, scenery-chewing performance.

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Khan suffers from the problem of being an ill-defined character. At the beginning of the film, we hate him - he blew up a bunch of people! He killed Pike! That makes him bad! Then we find out that he had a pretty good justification (Starfleet held his crew hostage and kept him prisoner so they could build futuristic WMDs) for killing all those people, and as an audience, we're on his side again. Then, for no discernible reason, and with no discernible plan, he turns evil again just so the film can have a climax. 

This goes against his characterization as a tactical genius, and furthermore, it's a difficult pill to swallow because at no point in the film does Khan do something completely evil. He displays no taste for sadism or callous brutality. All the people he kills or attacks, he has good reason to do. The only reason we have to believe that he's actually a bad guy is that Old Spock tells us he is. Which is breaking the #1 most basic rule of storytelling - SHOW, DON'T TELL. 

By contrast, Montalban's Khan:

a) Has a clear motive that drives his character (Revenge against Kirk.)

b) He has a unique characterization (his love of Moby Dick) including tragic flaws (obsession, arrogance)

c) is, even with his understandable motivations, evil, and the film shows us. He takes sadistic pleasure in forcing the awful mind-worms on Chekov, and rather than kill his nemesis, as he famously tells us:

"I've done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet... buried alive! Buried alive…!"

Even so, Star Trek Into Darkness has one of the better villains of the summer. Here's a brief rundown of the other offenders.

Man of Steel's General Zod: A thinly characterized one-dimensional space Hitler. He has no memorable personality beyond screaming and bugging his eyes. He has only the vaguest and most nebulously defined goals of rebuilding Krypton and achieving genetic purity and getting revenge on Jor-El by beating up his son, all of which serves to make him so boring that I don't care who he kills, or how many buildings he knocks down.

Elysium had Jodie Foster playing Rich White Jerk #1. The only thing that made her character at all remarkable is that she was a woman. If you replaced her character with a man, the film wouldn't change at all. But it wouldn't really change if you replaced it with a piece of wood either. The only concession to giving her a unique quality is her frankly ridiculous accent. Sharlto Copely brings the crazy, but despite how cool he looks and sounds - he's not a very effective villain.

The Wolverine had way too complex a plot, including a multitude of ill-defined villains. Viper was the clichéd femme fatale, Yuriko's father (whose name I can't recall, which is already a bad sign) is the clichéd evil father, and the film's ultimate villain is the clichéd switcharoo, where the character you thought was good turns out to be bad all along. For no real reason except the film wanted a plot twist. And side-note - they completely mishandled a really badass villain, the Silver Samurai.

Once again, the summer's bright spot turns out to be Iron Man 3. 

MASSIVE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

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Okay, you were warned. 

So, part of the charm of Iron Man 3 is the fact that writer/director Shane Black gave us a throwback to the action movie heyday of the 80s and 90s. And one of the things even bad action movies of that time did well was memorable, over the top villains. Iron Man 3 does the same.

First of all, the Mandarin. The Mandarin is built up as a deadly threat, to the point where I was really, really anticipating his inevitable showdown with Iron Man. Of course, part of the genius of the film is that we only get glimpses of The Mandarin, just like the shark in Jaws. Black gives us lines like "No talking and no eye contact unless you want to get shot in the face" to sell us on the idea that this guy is a dangerous psycho, and we see him casually presiding over atrocities and making cold-blooded speeches about murdering people. The Mandarin is established as having a clear goal (the overthrow of the United States and the murder of the U.S. President), having a personality (kind to children, speaks in parables, doesn't like being looked at, Chinese iconography), and being irredeemably evil (kills multiple innocents to prove a point). All of which makes him memorable and scary. So Iron Man 3 has got itself a wonderful villain.

Except of course, Ben Kingsley's Mandarin is a fake. That's right. Iron Man 3 satisfies all the criteria for a great screen villain - and he's not even the real bad guy.

The real bad guy is Guy Pearce's character, Aldritch Killian, and guess what? He also satisfies all the criteria of villainy. His goals are the same as the fake-Mandarin's, plus getting Pepper Potts as his trophy and one-upping or killing Tony. He has a personality - even an honest to goodness character arc. He goes from being bullied and ignored by Tony Stark to reinventing himself as a ruthless amoral arms dealer. And he's funny! Some of his quips are just as good as Tony's. (I especially love his exasperated "Pepper, please." while he's holding her against a wall by her throat, she's struggling to get free, and he's just trying to carry on a conversation.) Not only is he funny, but he is evil and we see him being evil. He casually murders Rebecca Hall's character when she starts mouthing off, he taunts Tony when they both believe Pepper to be dead, and he poses a serious threat to Tony in a fight. Furthermore, he's a dark reflection of Tony Stark without being just another guy in a metal suit. He's a great, memorable, menacing villain. 

Hell, even the "sub-bosses" of the movie, the other Extremis soldiers, are memorable villains, with personalities that distinguish them from the generic cannon fodder baddies. They aren't just faceless props in a set piece. 

Regrettably, Iron Man 3 is the exception, rather than the rule. It should be obvious, but it's not (apparently) - having a great villain is key to having a successful blockbuster.