http://listverse.com/2007/12/27/top-10-badass-movie-characters/
A) Top 10 Badass Movie Characters
Throughout the history of modern cinema, there have been many iconic heroes and villains. Here is a Top 10 list of the baddest movie characters that you wouldn’t have a chance against in a fight. One condition though, they have to be human.
10. Marv Sin City
Starting off the list, we have Marv, a famous protagonist from Frank Miller’s graphic novel and film ‘Sin City’. He’s such a badass that he just shrugs off multiple gunshot wounds; being hit by a car; a blow to the head by a sledgehammer; and even electrocution. To add insult to injury, he often takes trench coats of the people he kills. He’s also an incessant drinker with an extremely high alcohol tolerance. Meaning he can probably kick your ass after a few six-packs and a bottle of vodka.
Dons: trench coat, leather pants and army boots.
Badass Quote: “That there is one damn fine coat you’re wearing.”
9. Drill Sergeant Hartman Full Metal Jacket
In movies, we see a lot of tough drill instructors. None, however, come close to the badass-ness of Drill Sergeant Hartman from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, ‘Full Metal Jacket’. His hair-raising tirades could very well send someone into insanity, which is exactly what he did to Private Gomer Pyle. He loses some cool points for getting shot by Private Pyle in the bathroom, though.
Dons: a number of medals pinned on his khaki shirt.
Rank: Senior Drill Instructor and Gunnery Sergeant
Badass Quote: “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?”
8. John Shaft Shaft
Shaft is one bad motherfucker. How do I know that? The movie’s theme song says so. Delivering memorable one-liners and clearing the scum off of Harlem’s streets is all part of the job for this aggressive detective. Shaft is so cool that he can be a badass and a ladies’ man at the same time. Damn, Samuel L. Jackson was born to play this role. At least it’s better than playing the Jedi with the purple lightsaber.
Dons: a leather outfit, fitted with a high-powered shotgun.
Badass Quote: “You wouldn’t know Egyptian cotton if Pharaoh himself gave it to you, you knock-off-wearing motherfucker.”
7. Vic Vega, A.K.A. Mr. Blonde Reservoir Dogs
Vic Vega is an iconic character in Quentin Tarantino’s first and very underrated movie, ‘Reservoir Dogs’. He’s so damn badass that just after being released from jail, he decides to team up and go on a jewelry heist. He’s robbing a jewelry store, when the alarm trips. Not even batting an eyelash, Vic stays cool and then threatens the whole store. Most robbers would have been running out of there when they heard the alarm, but he just stays calm and collected.
Alias: Mr. Blonde
Badass Quote: “Are you gonna bark all day, doggie, or are you gonna bite?”
6. Lara Croft Tomb Raider
Forget peanut butter and chocolate. Forget Sonny and Cher. It doesn’t get much better than guns and boobs. Lara Croft is one tough chick. She’s strong as hell, she knows how to wield a gun, and can climb a pole like no other. It’s not easy to look hot and deadly at the same time, but she easily pulls that off.
Dons: a tight dark shirt and shorts.
Weapon of Choice: two handguns holstered at each hip.
Badass Quote: “Why would I try and cheat you out of anything, now? I need you to get the piece so I can steal it from you later.”
5. John McClane Die Hard series
\
Terrorists’ worst fear, John McClane, is one tough dude. Even though most of the ‘Die Hard’ movies sucked, he’s still remembered as that bald guy who somehow foiled four terrorist plots. He’s a 47 year old chain smoking vigilante who’s “two steps away from being a full-fledged alcoholic”, and he can still kick some serious ass. He gives hope to middle-aged men everywhere who someday wish to save the world from terrorism.
Number of Films: four.
Badass Quote: “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker”.
4. James Bond James Bond series
There have been many Bonds in history. There’s ugly Bond, blonde Bond, narcoleptic Bond, the Bond that no one cares about, and then there’s Sean Connery. He was the first and he was the best. If you make fun of his Scottish accent, he will come to your house, seduce all of the women within a ten-mile radius, have sex with them, and punch you in the face. Bond is the coolest spy ever.
Dons: a sharp suit and tie.
Weapon of Choice: Walther PPK
Badass Quote: “The name’s Bond…James Bond.”
3. John Rambo Rambo series
How can one man single-handedly kill hundreds of people armed only with a knife? Yeah, it doesn’t really make much sense, but it makes for some kickass movies. Rambo. The muscle-shirt clad beast has inspired more phrases than any other action hero and has become a synonym for ‘badass’. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Rambo III broke the record for the most violent film, with 221 acts of violence and 108 deaths.
Dons: a muscle-shirt, bandana and jeans.
Number of Films: four (Rambo 4 coming out soon).
Badass Quote: “I could have killed ‘em all, I could kill you. In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe. Let it go. Let it go.”
2. Tony Montana Scarface
Nobody has inspired people to buy more framed posters and “replica bullets” than Tony Montana. You can’t watch an MTV Cribs episode without seeing at least one over-caffeinated rapper showing off his Scarface poster and DVD. Al Pacino acted the part of a drug dealer beautifully, encompassing the trials and tribulations one must go through to make it big as a mobster.
Background: escaped from Cuba and worked odd jobs until he got involved with a powerful mobster.
Badass Quote: “Say hello to my little friend!”
1. Darth Vader Star Wars series
The most badass character ever has to be Darth Vader. The man in black (sorry Johnny Cash) has been featured in four films and is the most powerful character in the Star Wars universe. He took control of half the galaxy and could kill you by snapping his fingers. He does lose some cool points for the ending of Return of the Jedi, when Luke takes off Vader’s helmet and you see his ugly face. Anyway, I bet you he’s using his powers on me right now…
Dons: a big black suit and helmet.
Weapon of Choice: he doesn’t even need a weapon, he’ll kill you with his fucking mind!
Contributor: dazednconfused
B) Top 10 Badass Movie Villains
While there is a little overlap with this previous list, the members of this list are all suited to it sufficiently to overlook the duplication. These are characters who are not necessarily evil to the core – that would be another list – and in some cases you even have sympathy or fondness for the character.
10) Mrs. Iselin – Dame Angela Lansbury
She doesn’t gun down busloads of people, but there’s more than one way to be bad-ass. Mrs. Iselin is the wife of a senator, and her son, Raymond Shaw, hates her domineering attitude toward him. Shaw has been brainwashed by Soviet Communists years before the movie begins, and his own mother is a communist agent working undercover in America in order that she and her husband (really just she) gain all power in the White House. She does this by using her own son, Shaw, as a tool. She has absolutely no love for him. Or anyone else. All she wants is global power.
The idea of brainwashing her own son, of which activity she was the driving force, in order to force him to assassinate the President, after which Shaw goes to jail and she gets the power, is monumentally bad-ass!
9) Sgt. Alonzo Harris – Denzel Washington
He’s got better performances under his belt, but this one is outstanding. Harris gets into hot water when he personally beats a Russian mafia member to death in full view of people in Las Vegas. You gotta be bad-ass to willfully screw around with the Russian mafia.
They demand monetary recompense, and he sees to this by breaking the law every time he has to, robbing a known drug dealer, personally executing that drug dealer with a shotgun at point-blank range, enjoying his dying breaths in the process, robbing drug dealing street punks, and personally threatening to kill his own brand-new partner if he talks! He threatens him twice with guns, forces him to smoke a PCP-laced joint, then berates and threatens everyone in his entire neighborhood when his partner finally confronts him! That’s called FTW! That’s what that’s called!
8. Daniel Plainview – Daniel Day-Lewis
Not an easy choice, given the definition of bad-ass, but I say he is. All he cares about is money. That’s it. And he will gladly kill every person on the planet to get more of it. Luckily oil drilling doesn’t require genocide, but he does see fit to execute a complete stranger who lies to him for a cut of the money.
Then he buries the body to hide the evidence. He publicly beats the minister of a small town, the sort of thing that will be found out by everyone in town sooner or later. Does he pick up and leave? No way! Just stays and keeps drilling the oil for himself. He blatantly reneges of monetary promises, and if you believe in God and jesus and such, dig this: he allows the minister to baptize him, provided that he gets the last tract of land in the area, to build a pipeline through it. He could not care less about the baptism. He uses God himself as a tool to get more money.
At the end, he cements his legacy by beating the minister to death with a bowling pin, after humiliating him. His own butler just stands and looks at him sitting next to the body. No surprise. Now that’s bad-ass.
7) Archibald Cunningham – Tim Roth
A Britishman who dresses like a French fop. Even the characters around him think he’s gay, let alone public sentiment today. But he’s one of the finest swordsmen in the world, and derives sadistic ecstasy in dispatching a duelist one piece at a time, slowly, methodically, until the poor guy is helpless and terrified.
Ol’ Archy’s most bad-ass move by far, though, is slowly, methodically raping the helpless wife of a Scotsman who has irritated him. The Scottish are beneath him, he feels, and sees nothing wrong with raping and killing them. Then he leaves her alive to grieve.
Then the much larger Scot challenges him to a duel. Cunningham doesn’t even hesitate. “Bring him on.” And he enjoys himself immensely, slicing the Scot again and again, until the Scot finally kills him. Dead or not, Cunningham is one mean jerk!
6) Tony Montana – Al Pacino
No death scene has ever been more FTW!!! than Montana’s. He’s the greatest druglord in all creation, and uses more of his cocaine than anyone else. He just doesn’t give a flying rip. But that’s the thing. He never did. All the rival gang members in the world come down on top of him, and does he call security? Piss on security!
He loads a particularly grandiose self-defense weapon and proceeds to take on all comers. He just wastes ‘em right and left like rats. They shoot back, but he deliberately hocked himself up on coke beforehand, and now he’s nearly unstoppable. Shot after shot goes through his torso, and he takes ‘em like a man and shoots back, grenades and full-auto. His rivals can’t even take him off his feet! He’s just lost his sister, so he doesn’t care anymore. He just stands there shooting back and taunting them! They finally have to shoot him in the back.
His most bad-ass scene, though, is much earlier, when a drug deal goes sour, and he’s captured. The buyer demands all the drugs. He threatens Montana with a chainsaw! Montana is tied up and defenseless, and what does he do? He taunts the buyer to his face! “Why don’t you stick your head up your ass? See if it fits.”
5) Don Logan – Sir Ben Kingsley
In the annals of bad-ass scriptwriting, this one has to be #1! Kudos to the writer, whoever you are, because all those repeated Nos and Yeses and such are actually written that way on the page! Kingsley wasn’t ad-libbing! But the marvelous performance is all his, and he based it on his grandmother! Talk about Thanksgiving.
Logan wants the ol’ gang’s best safecracker back in action for one more heist. The safecracker is retired and living the sweet life in sunny Spain. Not an easy person to convince to return to a life of crime. Logan actually pulls it off, at the ultimate cost of his life, granted, but he just refuses to back off.
He smashes a beer bottle over the safecracker’s head, he screams like a lurching gorilla right into his ear, he howls, he kicks walls, threatens everyone around him with death, he publicly trashtalks the safecraker’s wife, Jackie, and lady friend, says how lousy they both were in bed. The safecracker’s wife is an ex-porn star, and Logan makes several points of that. He walks right up to a kid with a rifle pointed at him and mocks his fear.
And nobody, NOBODY, has ever unleashed a torrent of awe-inspiring, profanity-laced volcano language on the level of Don Logan. “Laced” isn’t the proper word. It’s profanity-inundated. If it’s an art, this guy is Jackson Pollock. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!!! No f___ing way! No f___ing way! No f___ing way! No f___ing way! You made me look a right c___!” “I don’t give two s___s what Jackie Big-Tits thinks, she can think what she f___ing likes!” “I WON’T LET YOU BE HAPPY!! WHY SHOULD I?!?!” “F___ off, wanker! You’re doing it!”
This guy played Gandhi!
4) Bill “the Butcher” Cutting – Daniel Day-Lewis
He’s so bad-ass that you love him! You want to see him dead more than anything in the world, but not for awhile. First you want to see him be bad-ass! He’s certainly got the coolest threads of anyone on the list. He smokes hash, he shoots morphine, he bangs hookers three and four at the time, and he rules the Five Point with “a spectacle of fearsome acts.”
He cudgels his political rival, a man many people in the area like a lot, with the rival’s own club. But that’s after he throws a meat cleaver into his back. Dozens of people witness it. No one dares say a word or try to stop him. “Why doncha burn him? See if his ashes turn green?” he mocks an onlooker over the dead body. This guy is none too fond of the Irish. “If only I had the guns, Mr. Tweed, I’d shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil.”
He stands his ground and fights like a man, charging right into a crowd of opposing gangs. He lost a fight once, and personally cut outhis own left eye, and sent it to the victor wrapped in blue paper. As a show that he would never look away again. “I would’ve cut ‘em both out, if I could’ve fought him blind.”
No loyalty. He is the man. Everyone else is loyal to him. Or dead.
3) Darth Vader – David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Sebastian Shaw
All the geeks were sweating up to now, I’m sure. No argument, Darth Vader is an icon of bad-assness. All he wants is the rebel alliance crushed. They’re a threat to the empire, and he has no qualms about obliterating an entire planet of innocent species to draw those rebels out of hiding. He cuts off his own son’s hand. He tries his best to tempt him to the dark side, and when that fails, he threatens to tempt his daughter, of whom he has just learned. He says it with such malicious glee. He loves his job!
Hayden Christensen is not included for good reason. If I ever feel like ranking the biggest p_____s (female reproduction orifices), I expect he’ll make the list.
The original Vader just stalks around force-choking people to death. “Apology accepted, Captain Nieder!” Then on top of all that, he has a change of heart at the last second and personally kills the emperor at the cost of his own life.
2) Dr. Hannibal Lecter – Sir Anthony Hopkins
How do you escape a super-ultra-hypermax security prison-asylum? Arrange to be transferred to anther facility, with more moderate security. True, the opportunity is lucky, but Lecter is always on watch for such things. I deliberated about whether he belonged, since he’s psychopathic. That means he has no feelings for the soul of anyone around him. But it doesn’t detract from his fearlessness, his sadism, or his brilliance. Nobody’s ever had a more horrifying stare.
Never mind that he eats people, first, he totally mindf___s Clarice, all just to grab a little payment for himself: moderate security. Then he still has to escape, which isn’t going to be easy. He picks his cuffs, he efficiently beats down both well armed guards. Then, to cement his legacy among the baddest of the bad-ass, he changes clothes with one guard, cuts his face off while he’s still alive, puts it on his own, and rides right out on a gurney. No one saw it coming. That’s after he disembowels the other guard and hangs him from his jail cell. He puts the guard’s pancreas on the guard’s head. He even has the nerve to call Clarice later–at the FBI’s headquarters–to let her know he’s out and having the time of his life. And he tells her a bad joke, “I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
1) The Joker – Heath Ledger
Let’s run through the logic on this one: this guy robs a mafia-owned bank, rigs the heist so that all his accomplices kill each other, he kills the last one, takes only the mafia’s money, $60,000,000, and then personally confronts every one of the mafia bosses at the same time. He walks right in laughing! They know he’s the one who robbed them, and he proceeds to make things worse by killing one of their underlings with his disappearing-pencil trick. He gleefully mocks them about paying for his new suit, then deliberately insults the one who’s angriest. Why? Well, because he’s the angriest. What makes this guy tick?
He lets on that he only robbed them to initiate a citywide war with one of the baddest crime-fighters in 20th Century fiction. It’s good sport. He demands half of the mafia’s money in exchange for killing Batman. This is after he’s robbed them. Later, he lets the angry mafia boss capture him, just so he can cut the guy’s throat. Then the Joker goes right about his business!
He executes people daily throughout Gotham just to make Batman take his mask off and give up. Why? He explains that to Batman after he rigs his own capture. “I wanted to see whatcha’d do! And ya didn’t disappoint!”
What the hell makes this guy tick? He explains himself to Harvey Harvey Harvey Dent, after he’s sure Dent won’t be returning to the land of heroes. “I’m an agent of chaos.” Folks, in my opinion, that is the definition of bad-ass. How do you deal with a guy like this? He’s so bad-ass that he has no rules! He tries to execute innocent hostages just to play a little game with Batty.
Then on top of everything else, he actually has the nerve to justify himself to Batman. “I’ll show ya. When the chips are down? These uh…’civilized’ people? They’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.” Then he just lets Batman beat him for a while, and laughs in his face the whole time. You cannot get more bad-ass than that.
