Vote up the moments when you felt sympathy for a character you previously disliked.
Audiences love a truly hateable character, whether they're ruthless, spineless, or the type of baddie who doesn't even know they're driving the protagonist insane. There's something fun about watching a character who's just straight-up awful and runs through life doing whatever they want, but when those characters can actually make us feel bad, they become transcendent.
How a character that we hate can make us sad differs from film to film. Sometimes all an audience needs to see is that a character is human for the waterworks to turn on, but some characters need a little more oomph to make us cry - whether that oomph is a wood chipper or an entire ship sinking into the Atlantic Ocean.
All of the following characters are easy to hate - but which of them actually made you feel something?
Del Griffith is a seriously annoying human being. Aside from being a traveling salesman (the worst!), he's a close talker who doesn't know when to shut up. When Neal Page gets stuck with Del on a never-ending trip home to Chicago, he finds himself on a hellish ride into the pits of humanity. Of course, Del is a human being who isn't actually evil - he just hasn't had anyone to talk to since his wife passed.
It's not just the knowledge that Del lost his wife that makes the audience sad - it's the moment when he tells Neal that he knows exactly how he's perceived by his traveling companion and that he doesn't care. When he drops the facade of the chatty Midwesterner and says that "what you see is what you get," it's heartbreaking to realize he's been letting Neal hate him all this time without retaliation because he knows it makes his new friend feel better about himself.
Johnny is the absolute worst in The Karate Kid. A classic Southern California entitled brat, he's good-looking, athletic, and accepted by his peers - all great things he manages to turn toxic. He torments Daniel LaRusso throughout the first film in the series, and the only human moments the audience gets with him are when he's getting grief from his hyper-aggressive sensei, John Kreese.
It's not until the sequel that picks up moments after Johnny is crane-kicked into oblivion at a karate tournament that we really get to see just how pathetic this bully really is. The Karate Kid Part II opens with Johnny getting whomped in the parking lot of the All-Valley Karate Tournament by his sensei, and it's at this moment that it becomes clear just how sad he is. It's not just that he's a teenager who's getting slapped around by an adult - it's the way that the one person he emulates in his life has turned on him. Johnny isn't just being bullied by his bully; he's revealed to be a wimp. It's really hard to watch.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy does an amazing thing by making Gollum look like either a piece of trash or the most sympathetic creature in the universe from scene to scene. When Sam and Frodo first encounter the ring-warped monster in The Two Towers, he's literally trying to bash their brains in to take back his "precious," but this malnourished little freak has nothing on the power of friendship.
Rather than do away with Gollum, Sam and Frodo decide to tie him up with a rudimentary collar and drag him to the Black Gate of Mordor, which happens to be when Gollum is at his most pathetic. The little creep literally throws his body along the rocks to beg for his life, but it's not just the way he's moving; it's the way his voice modulates from a whine to a squeal - all while he's just trying to stay alive so he can have one more moment with the ring. This scene isn't just sad - it's hard to watch.
There's nothing worse than watching a father beg his son for help. It's embarrassing, and in the case of Lucius Malfoy, it's completely dehumanizing. For most of the films set in the Wizarding World, Lucius is a Fabio-esque pure-blood wizard who looks down on anyone who's not a Death Eater, but after Voldemort returns, he's kicked back down to underling status, and it's really sad. However, you don't really feel bad for him until he literally has to beg his son, Draco, to turn over Harry Potter to the Dark Lord.
In the scene, Lucius takes Draco aside in front of all of the Death Eaters in his manor and tells his son that if they deliver Potter to Voldemort, then they could ascend from their second-tier status. Draco is already torn over selling out his frenemy, but seeing his dad grovel can't help matters. We've never liked Lucius (he's very bad and not good!), but watching him act like a dog who wants to eat some scraps is rough.
Jane Hudson has suffered the greatest indignity that any star of the stage and screen can ever face: She's gotten old, and no one remembers her. Oh, and she crushed her sister's legs in a drunken car accident at the mansion they share, or at least that's what she believes. Thanks to the terrible accident, Jane's sister, Blanche, is confined to a wheelchair, so Jane does what any villain would do - she drinks constantly and puts her sister through mental and physical torture before coming up with a plan to rob her of her remaining finances and leave her to perish in their decrepit home.
As irredeemable as Jane seems in this film, there's a moment that will rip your heart out towards the end. After trying to rob Blanche, Jane runs away to the beach where she attempts to just straight-up succumb to the elements, but Blanche tracks her sister down and explains that Jane wasn't behind the wheel the night that her legs were crushed. Blanche tells Jane she was driving and that when she got out of their car to open the gate, she left the car in neutral and she couldn't get out of the way in time. Then she just let Jane and the rest of the world go on believing the accident was Jane's fault. Watching the realization of what really happened spill across Jane's face is so sad that it makes you wonder how you'd handle it if someone told you that you were living a lie.
How bad should we feel for Hal 9000? After all, this piece of artificial intelligence is technically not alive - or is it? It plays chess, it has conversations with the astronauts aboard the Discovery One, and it even gets sick when it malfunctions, but that's where the issue lies. Once Hal 9000 begins to malfunction, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole realize they need to turn off the AI, and that's when Hal lashes out.
Programmed to achieve its mission regardless of the collateral damage, Hal kills one astronaut before disconnecting the life support of the other folks aboard the Discovery. The only person who can stop the AI is Bowman, who shuts down Hal's central core, and that's when this murderous AI gives us all a big frowny face. Hal realizes what Bowman is doing and pleads with the astronaut to let him live even as his brain functions begin to slow down. It's hard to watch this robot succumb to a fate similar to one that many elderly people face, especially in a movie that's so devoid of emotion. It's fitting that the robot would be the thing to make us cry.
