July 8, 2001
The Observer
Where are all the bad guys?
by Peter Preston

Hollywood needs believable villains, but there's not much menace on the screen these days. Blame it on the current generation of wholesome stars, says Peter Preston

Nor, for that matter, was it with Scott in Mission: Impossible II. He was honed and energetic, but could just as easily have been a good guy, not a bad boy, if Tom Cruise had had contract difficulties. And Glen - the arch foe of Lara Croft - wouldn't shiver a forklift bra, let alone many timbers.

It isn't their fault. They are hired to do a competent job, and they deliver. If the central casting IBM is bizarrely programmed to churn out Celts on demand - Robbie Coltrane and Robert Carlyle aafter the last couple of Bonds - then somebody ought to change the programme. But what, and who, to? Heroes, to be memorably heroic, need villains to match: and the fact is that the wells of charismatic vileness are running low.

Suppose you're a producer with a blockbuster scheduled. Suppose John Malkovich is out of town judging some film festival in Cairo. Suppose Dennis Hopper is booked (very likely, because he is averaging seven films a year at the moment). Suppose Christopher Walken, nudging towards 60, is a little elongated in the fang for this particular role. Then you're in trouble. Big stars, demanding big money, can always be tempted in, of course. John Travolta, after Face/Off and the galactic shambles of Battlefield Earth, swings both ways. Gene Hackman still offers corrupt machine politicians à la carte. Yet the hate list, on consideration, is pitifully short. Robert De Niro has caught the comedy bug late in life. Tommy Lee Jones seems too damned respectable after his homage to rooming with Al Gore at last year's Democratic convention. Al Pacino bombed playing Satan. Anthony Hopkins is so stellar that the villain has to win in the end, which rather limits your script options.

One wheeze, tentatively experimented with now, involves turning our younger heroes into ad hoc villains. Thus Keanu Reeves became serial killer in The Watcher: not a success. Reeves specialises in bemused, blank athleticism. Two tadpoles couldn't survive in his inner depths. Thus Matt Damon became the viciously talented Mr Ripley: but Damon is too damned wholesome, too devoid of oily charm, for hidden menace. Johnny Depp, strutting balefully in one of his Before Night Falls cameos, may do a decent psychotic one day; but not yet. That cupboard is bare.

Once upon a golden time there was a Hollywood heavy mob which made a steady living. Jan Merlin did baby-faced killers. Neville Brand and Jack Elam did sadistic gunmen. Lyle Bettger (or, if the director was flush with funds, Robert Ryan) played Mr Big. Lloyd Bochner, a hatchet presence, was the mafia honcho in the front office. Jack Palance sometimes got his name above the titles. You knew where you were when you saw them coming. You didn't need to work out whose side you were on. But then the second features and the bog standard westerns dried up. Then the repertory company of malevolence fractured. Lee Marvin, like Bogart before him, became a battered hero asking to be loved. Robert Mitchum swung both ways, leaving us The Night of the Hunter to remember him fearfully by. They had a few worthy successors. Andy Robinson, lips twisting luridly, was a fine berserk killer through the Seventies. Joe Don Baker, for a while, looked a durable hit man. Walken, old frozen face, fed the Dogs of War before reading his Pulp Fiction and finding True Romance. But now, when evil is high on the menu, Hollywood only looks in one direction. Hollywood automatically thinks British.

That's a reaction with roots in history. I'm sitting in Camberwell writing this piece. William Henry Pratt was born just down the road - and became Boris Karloff. The old music hall on the Green welcomed Tod Slaughter doing Sweeney Todd. The ripe sense of melodrama which defines satisfactory villainy - say Malkovich's Cyrus the Virus in Con-Air - needs outrageous mugging. Britain also gave the world the most subtle villain of the lot: James Mason, all inscrutable softness and cheekbones. We do do these things rather well. Christopher Lee never gave a bad, bad performance. Tim Roth has made a twitching, neurotic fortune in the years since Reservoir Dogs. Watch him lead the gorilla hordes in Planet of the Apes. Gary Oldman - the supremely scheming senator in The Contender - steals every scene he appears in. These villains fill the screen. But they do not come off some facile production line. Just being English or Scottish, and therefore non-American, isn't enough.

Jeremy Irons lacked the extroversion and steel to see off Bruce Willis in the third Die Hard. Christopher Eccleston - from Salford, not Strathclyde - didn't have the weight to make Gone in 60 Seconds a contest. Dougray Scott, Iain Glen and Butler come in the same bland package. Villainy needs expansive, lip-smacking relish. Ben Kingsley smeared that old mustard all over his ham in Sexy Beast. Paul Bettany had a haunting, cold chill in Gangster No 1. Yet maybe, for the full effect, you need costume kitsch. It certainly helps the latest challenger in the malevolence stakes, Rufus Sewell.

Sewell is the pretty, saturnine lad from Twickenham who pottered through BBC period dramas and inoffensive comedies until, last year, he was suddenly much the best thing about Bless the Child (as boss of a devil cult giving Kim Basinger and babe a hard time). Next month he's Count Adhemar, the champion jouster in black, pitched against Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale and uttering saliva-drenched, triumphalist lines like: 'You have been weighed, you have been measured and you have been found wanting.' It's a terrific turn which World Wrestling Federation addicts will embrace. Over the top and into the trees - half Darth Vader, half Blackadder. A career waiting to explode.

'English actors,' Sewell says mildly, 'are always playing bad guys. I think it's because of a different relationship with the language - or maybe it's the inherent mistrust of the English.' Anyway, after plodding around too long in the BBC Middlemarches, he has a future which picks up his Seth Starkadder from Cold Comfort Farm and the Shakespearian swagger of his training. He is not, blessedly, afraid to emote or gloat. His name will be on the computer.

Money in the bank? Perhaps, if A Knight's Tale (derring-do with rock music) happens to start a fad. Some of the best villains ever had a thumping time in the tin-can days of old: James Mason in Prince Valiant, a snake-tongued George Sanders and Stanley Baker as blights of the round table, David Farrar glowering darkly, Duncan Lamont, steeped in stubbled treachery for Quentin Durward; and Basil Rathbone, plus the sublime Alan Rickman, getting trounced by Robin Hood. This is a rich vein - a field of combat where techno-gimmicks have no place, where acting impure and far from simple rules.

The great villains of theatre belong to Marlowe and Webster as well as to the bard. They don't set out to conquer the world so much as manipulate it into bloody subservience. Their fiendish histrionics give them crawling flesh. And so it is, perhaps, with the finest sub-genre of them all: the vaguely Biblical epic. Peter Ustinov has never been better than he was as the slobbering Nero in Quo Vadis. The huggable revelation of Gladiator is Joaquin Phoenix, the angles of his face warped by a consuming, petulant hatred. But the ripest role of the lot, the poisoned palm for treacherous megalomania, always belongs to Caligula. There are those who say they love the silken, slimy Emlyn Williams in the 1937 rendition, but I'm eternally hooked on Jay Robinson in The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators, a wildly camp version of John McEnroe, high on speed and sadism, turning tantrums into a unique rampage of goggle-eyed entertainment.

Whatever became of poor Jay, last glimpsed a few years ago in an offering called Malibu Bikini Shop ? Alas, they don't make Robes any longer. But, if they start again after Gladiator, they can bring him back as Messalina. Meanwhile, it's time to re-balance the odds.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, the threat of Moscow and supposed world domination went with it and villains have had to make their own way again, without Ronnie Reagan to build their evil empires for them. They had, in short, to become bad life forces, not mere hissable symbols. Blockbusters need them (and Pearl Harbor is too darned sweet to the Japanese).

Perhaps it's time to get out the ancient drawing boards. Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon? Rufus Sewell as Prince John? John Travolta as L. Ron Hubbard? Linda Fiorentino as the Duchess of Malfi? The dearth is mostly a dearth of imagination and succulent parts. Time to give malignity its head. Leave the Scots for a while and give your script doctors The White Devil for Christmas: for without true villainy, heroism is a pallid, pasty thing.

• Lara Croft Tomb Raider opened on Friday; A Knight's Tale opens in August

- Thanks to Gill for the find!