Top 10 Best Movie Anti-Heroes

Speaking of mediocre, one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most ho-hum stories ironically made for the best film adaptation of his work (so far), thanks to horror’s greatest anti-hero, Herbert West. Played with sexless charisma by Jeffrey Combs, West has the concentrated intensity of a surgical laser, aimed only at scientific discovery. West’s journeys take him to the depths of immorality and corrupt everyone around him, but his fierce dedication to the most noble of goals - curing death itself - will always make him the hero… at least in the history books.

Novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most popular creation has actually made it to the silver screen several times, but these two films represent the character at his anti-heroic best. Anthony Minghella’s Ripley stars Matt Damon in the character’s youth, struggling to create a complicated ethos in which murder and betrayal are the only aspects of his identity he can truly call his own. But while Damon’s Ripley is just pathetic enough to feel guilty about being a sociopath, John Malkovich’s portrayal of an older Ripley, comfortable in his own skin, is the more compelling of the two. In Liliana Cavani’s underseen Ripley’s Game, Ripley’s inhumanity has brought him a life of love and financial comfort, but when these hard-won accomplishments are insulted off-handedly at a party, he decides to destroy the offender’s very existence. Somehow, through the icy gaze of Malkovich’s antihero, it hardly seems like an overreaction.

Okay, so doomsday cultists have somehow brought the Central American dragon god Quetzalcoatl to New York City, where it beheads countless victims when it's not taking refuge in its secret lair at the top of the Chrysler Building. David Carradine and Richard Roundtree are on the case, but somehow our protagonist is the pathetic Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a former getaway driver trying - and failing - to go straight for his girlfriend, and the only person in the city who knows where "Q" makes his nest. As New Yorkers die left and right, Michael Moriarty takes the opportunity to hold the information to ransom. We’d hate him if we didn’t know exactly where he’s coming from.

Jason Voorhees may be the most prolific serial killer in history (I mean think about it, there were THOUSANDS of people on that space station in Jason X alone), but in spite of that everyone knows he’s the good guy. Like all great heroes, Jason was born from tragedy: a friendless, deformed child who drowned and survived, doubtless causing irrevocable brain damage, who saw his mother brutally slain by teenagers? Somehow that makes it okay for him to murder practically everyone he meets. And since practically everyone he meets is awful, or at least awfully annoying, audiences keep cheering him on every step of the way.

Jake and Elwood Blues may be on a mission from God to save a Catholic orphanage, but they accomplish their goals by pissing off just about everyone in the entire state of Illinois. They destroy a shopping mall, total dozens of police cars, skip out on the world’s biggest bar tab, skip out on Twiggy, dump Carrie Fisher (twice!), offer to buy an underage girl as a sex slave and, on top of it all, break three wristwatches. They’re bad people with good hearts, and while they deserve to be in jail, they also deserve our love and affection.