The best crime movies live or die by their villains, and while it is important to have a great hero to follow, it is the bad guys that people remember long after the movie has ended. What makes crime movies so memorable is that they offer the most magnetic villains, allowing the criminals to be charming and monstrous, making them someone the audience wants to see defeated, but not allowing them to take their eyes off them.
There are so many brilliant crime movie villains across cinema history. In the golden era of gangster movies, there were villains played by James Cagney and Paul Muni who were better than the heroes in those specific films. This was made even more important in the 1940s and 1950s, when the film noir genre made the protagonists villains and forced audiences to follow their criminal activities while somehow cheering for them to survive.
However, from the era of 1970s New Hollywood classics like Chinatown and The Godfather to modern masterpieces like No Country for Old Men and even comic book movies like The Dark Knight, these crime villains were genuine bad guys. Despite this, they still offered audiences a look at how even the most depraved and immoral villains could be so hard to look away from when they were at their worst.
The Joker: The Dark Knight (2008)
A lot of actors have played the Joker across Batman properties, from Cesar Romero in the old Batman TV show to Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman and even Joaquin Phoenix when Joker got his own film. However, no one touches the brilliance of Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. He is at his anarchic best when he faces off with Christian Bale’s Batman.
Ledger did such an amazing job playing the Joker that he posthumously won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role, something nearly unheard of for superhero movies. What makes him a perfect crime villain is that he doesn’t want anything material. He has no purpose other than creating chaos, and since he is unpredictable, it makes him more terrifying than almost any other villain in a crime movie.
Noah Cross: Chinatown (1974)
Chinatown stands the test of time as one of the greatest screenplays in Hollywood history, and the movie delivers a tense and disturbing tale of corruption and deceit. While Jack Nicholson is brilliant as Jake Gittes, the private detective pulled into the dark underworld of Chinatown, John Huston matches him as the villain, Noah Cross, someone who has dark secrets that he never once has to pay for.
What makes Noah such a terrifying villain is that he has no fear of repercussions, and he knows that money will save him in the end because he can pay off anyone who crosses him. He is also a unique crime movie villain because he is a wealthy Los Angeles land baron and former co-owner of the city’s water department who masterminds a corrupt land-and-water scheme. He only appears in three scenes, but he proves in those small moments that he holds all the cards.
Frank Costello: The Departed (2006)
The Departed is a Martin Scorsese remake of a Hong Kong crime drama called Infernal Affairs, which follows a police officer sent undercover in a mafia organization and a mafia henchman sent to infiltrate the Boston police force. Neither man knows who the other is. However, while those are the two main characters, the true villain here is Frank Costello, the mafia kingpin played by Jack Nicholson.
He is a charismatic father figure to both the mole inside the police force and the undercover cop in his own organization, and this makes him someone that both men trust, but someone no one should put their faith in. Frank was based on real-life gangster Whitey Bulger, and Nicholson improvised many of his lines, making him unpredictable and profane. The movie won Best Picture at the Oscars, but Nicholson was snubbed in the acting categories.
Doyle Lonnegan: The Sting (1973)
In 1973, Paul Newman and Robert Redford teamed up for the crime movie The Sting, which remains one of the best in the genre’s history. The two actors play grifters Henry Gondorff (Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Redford), who target a ruthless, ice-cold crime boss in the Depression era. The best way for a movie to make two conmen sympathetic is to make their target as evil as possible, and this movie does so masterfully.
Their target is Doyle Lonnegan, played by Robert Shaw (Jaws). The movie sets up the grift when Lonnegan has another con man named Luther Coleman killed, making this a revenge con for Henry and Johnny. Shaw delivers a simmering, furious performance as Lonnegan, and while he ends up outsmarted in the end, there is always a danger of what he will do next to get revenge of his own. The Sting won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Tommy DeVito: Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas is a Martin Scorsese crime movie about a man named Henry Hill who climbs the ranks of a major crime family before being forced to turn over evidence to bring the family down, and then being sent to witness protection. Ray Liotta was the main star as Hill, but he was surrounded by some amazing actors in the crime family, including Robert De Niro as Jimmy Conway and Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito.
While De Niro is always great, it was Pesci who stole the show as Tommy, who is delightfully unhinged throughout the entire film. His entire sequence where he asks Henry if he thinks he is a clown remains one of the most quoted lines from any crime movie to this very day. Pesci won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the performance, and he remains a highlight of a great gangster film.
Bill the Butcher: Gangs of New York (2002)
Released in 2002, Gangs of New York was a period crime film, taking place in New York in the 1860s. Leonardo DiCaprio is the protagonist in the film, but he is overshadowed at every turn by Daniel Day-Lewis as the villain, William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting. He is a violent nativist gang leader who rules the Five Points. He kills Amsterdam’s (DiCaprio) father and leads the young man to seek vengeance.
Day-Lewis was always going to be great, and this performance kept up his Oscar success, where he was nominated for Best Actor, although this was a case where he didn’t take home the gold statue. Bill is a terrifying character, one who will kill anyone at any time, but also one who remains oddly principled with a warped code of honor that helps him stand out among other crime movie villains.
Alonzo Harris: Training Day (2001)
Denzel Washington made his name in heroic roles, so it seems ironic that he won his only Best Actor Oscar for a role as a crime movie villain. This came in the 2001 crime drama Training Day, where Washington played a charismatic but deeply corrupt LAPD narcotics officer named Alonzo Harris. In this movie, he gets a new rookie partner named Jake (Ethan Hawke) and tries to lure him into his crooked world.
There are some incredible moments in the film, including when Alonzo roars, “King Kong ain’t got sh*t on me.” By the end of the movie, it is clear that Alonzo is so seductive and persuasive that there is no way Jake will make it out of this in one piece unless he takes drastic measures of his own. It is a rare crime movie where the villain is a cop, although he is as corrupt and criminal as anyone.
Michael Corleone: The Godfather Part II (1974)
Michael Corleone is a rare crime movie villain because he is actually the protagonist of The Godfather movie franchise. His fall is Shakespearean in nature, a war hero and a good man who finds himself pulled into his father’s world of organized crime. When his brother dies, he finds himself forced to take over the role of the family’s Don before his father also dies. This is all in the first movie, and by The Godfather Part II, Michael has turned into a terrifying villain.
Throughout the second film, Michael descends into cold, calculating ruthlessness across the film’s running time. He crosses the point of no return when he actually orders his own brother’s assassination to protect the family. Going from a principled war hero to a man who lost his soul completely, Michael Corleone might offer the greatest moral collapse of any character in cinema.
Tony Montana: Scarface (1983)
Tony Montana is similar to Michael Corleone in that he is someone who is a criminal, but whose story the audience is asked to follow. Also played by Al Pacino, there is one big difference between the two characters. Michael is a good man who turns evil. Tony Montana is never a good man. He is just a man who wants to make a life for himself that no one ever believed he deserved. He does it the wrong way.
Tony is a Cuban refugee who rises from nothing to become a ruthless, cocaine-fueled Miami drug lord. He kills people to achieve his dream, is ruthlessly vindictive to even those close to him, and even in the end, he is someone who fears nothing. The final gunfight, with Tony yelling, “Say hello to my little friend,” is still one of the most quoted in crime movie history.
Anton Chigurh: No Country for Old Men (2007)
The greatest crime movie villain in history was in the Coen Brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men. The movie follows a small-town guy named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who finds a drug deal gone bad and makes off with the briefcase of money he finds there. The drug lord then sends Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to retrieve the money. What is terrifying is that Chigurh kills countless people, including some left to chance and based solely on a coin flip.
Anton Chigurh represents Death itself, and he is relentless and unstoppable in his pursuit of Llewelyn. When he sets out on his path of destruction, he won’t stop killing until the job is complete. Chigurh is a philosophical force of nature. He is unbribable, unpredictable, and utterly without empathy. Bardem won an Oscar for his performance, and this character remains the best of the best when it comes to crime movie villains.