What Makes a Bravura Baddie?

It’s no secret to savvy filmmakers that villains are just as important as heroes to the creation of a potent adventure movie or a gripping suspense thriller. They may be even more important because good guys are usually colorless paragons of righteousness and virtue. Bad guys have the quirks, the tics, the delightfully unpredictable fetishes that make for truly memorable characters.

One reason that last year’s surprise smash “Double Jeopardy” defied the critics to become a box-office bonanza was that it had a marvelous slime ball of a villain: Ashley Judd’s duplicitous husband, played by Bruce Greenwood. He was smart and vicious enough to make a vivid nemesis.

Throughout film history, villainous roles have often been star-making turns. Richard Widmark burst into prominence in “Kiss of Death,” cackling as he threw a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. More recently, Kathleen Turner’s sizzling screen debut came as the seductive, fiendishly clever killer in “Body Heat.” And although Anthony Hopkins had appeared in a lot of movies before “The Silence of the Lambs,” it was his juicy turn as Hannibal Lecter that gave his career a needed jolt.

This summer’s popcorn movies may not contain any villains to rival those, but they certainly spotlight a conspicuous gallery of knaves. So it’s a good time to survey screen villainy and try to reach some conclusions about the qualities essential to a classic movie malefactor. For a choice villain you need both a great actor and a well-written role, and most of this summer’s offerings botch at least one half of the equation.

In the newest entry, Bryan Singer’s “X-Men,” we do have a superb actor, Ian McKellen, playing the master of the rebellious mutants, Magneto. McKellen supplies a suave, insinuating presence that goes a long way toward masking the failures of the script.

The creation of a truly menacing villain begins in the writing, with a plot full of wickedly ingenious twists. This is where “X-Men” falls short; its story line doesn’t offer Magneto enough opportunities to flaunt his power.

A great villain needs to have two essential qualities: He has to be intensely driven in his evil quest, and he has to be a formidable antagonist. In “X-Men,” Magneto does have a strong psychological motivation for his evildoing, but the back story that explains it is actually one of the movie’s more questionable gimmicks.

In a prologue set in Poland in 1944, we meet Magneto as a teenage victim of the Nazis, and we are led to believe that his deranged crusade on behalf of the world’s mutants stems from his early encounter with virulent anti-Semitism. But this attempt to inflate the movie by invoking one of the monumental tragedies of the 20th century seems awfully cheesy; images of the Holocaust don’t fit comfortably in a comic-book melodrama.

Once past the ponderous setup, Magneto fails to demonstrate the diabolical cleverness that the best movie villains exhibit. He never outsmarts the X-Men with a truly cunning counterpunch. Other action films have done a better job of convincing us that the heroes were up against a master strategist of mayhem. Alan Rickman in “Die Hard” and Dennis Hopper in “Speed” played genuinely brainy antagonists. Maybe the smartest of these baddies in recent years was the assassin played by John Malkovich in “In the Line of Fire,” who managed to stay one step ahead of Clint Eastwood throughout most of the story.

Great villains are so crafty that a part of us is secretly rooting for them to succeed. Shakespeare understood that when he created Richard III and Iago, who were unmistakably attractive because of their devilish wit and intelligence. In Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” which is subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero,” the scheming vixen, Becky Sharp, was far more magnetic than the virtuous characters she outwitted. Hitchcock’s most seductive villains, like Joseph Cotten in “Shadow of a Doubt” and Robert Walker in “Strangers on a Train,” definitely drew us into a web of complicity with evil.

And there’s a great Hitchcockian moment in “In the Line of Fire,” when Malkovich is loading his gun for the assassination and drops one of his bullets, and the audience gasps in frustration. When a cat-and-mouse game is riveting enough, we identify almost as closely with the villain as with the hero.

In other words, a good melodrama needs a monster of magisterial stature. Even a cartoon requires an imposing enemy. The characters we remember from Disney movies are the villains, from the Wicked Queen in “Snow White” to the evil Scar (voiced by Jeremy Irons) in “The Lion King.”

The failure to create an equally enthralling antagonist is one of the most glaring gaffes in this summer’s flop “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.” The movie’s villains, Natasha (Rene Russo) and Boris (Jason Alexander), are hopelessly bumbling in their attempts to foil moose and squirrel. An inept villain can work in a five-minute cartoon--think of Wile E. Coyote--but a feature, even a comic-book feature, needs a more commanding antagonist to sustain the action.

In comparison to many of the summer films, “The Patriot” definitely does have an imposing villain in the character of Jason Isaacs’ Col. Tavington, the snarling British sadist who wipes out women and children with blithe disdain. But the problem here is the opposite of the one in “X-Men.” Whereas Magneto is a tragic figure thrust into an escapist cartoon, Tavington is a comic-book villain in a movie with far loftier ambitions.

The people behind “The Patriot” didn’t set out to make a mindless action picture; they were hoping to invite comparisons with David Lean epics like “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” which won seven Academy Awards in 1957. But what made “Kwai” a groundbreaking war movie was that the hero, played by Alec Guinness, was something of a madman, and his enemy, the Japanese commander played by Sessue Hayakawa, was a tormented and comprehensible human being.

By contrast, Tavington’s one-dimensional villainy turns “The Patriot” into a crude revenge melodrama--”Death Wish” of 1776 instead of the Oscar contender it longed to be. Despite the failures of the script, Isaacs does give a masterfully sinister performance as Tavington. He’s already attracting the kind of attention from this movie that Widmark got from “Kiss of Death.”

Similarly, Jeffrey Wright, who has given fine performances in little-seen movies such as “Basquiat” and “Ride With the Devil,” makes a far more striking impression as the decadent Latino drug dealer in “Shaft.” With his impenetrable Spanish accent and his clumsy attempts at urbanity, Wright is a terrific comic villain, at once ridiculous and menacing. The idea of teaming him with a more unabashedly evil character, the coldhearted racist played by Christian Bale, was a good one, though the movie doesn’t provide quite enough interplay between these two thugs.

Nevertheless, “Shaft” reminds us that a double dose of villainy is usually an added treat. The best of the Bond movies had great evil teams such as Goldfinger and Oddjob. And the granddaddy of all swashbucklers, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” was generous enough to provide three scheming rotters: the sneaky Prince John (Claude Rains), the haughty Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) and the craven and conniving Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper).

My favorite summer villains are not in any of these high-profile action flicks but in the animated comedy “Chicken Run.” Directors Peter Lord and Nick Park and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick came up with a wonderful pair of meanies, the Tweedys, who run the chicken farm where the plucky hens and roosters are imprisoned. There’s delectable interplay between Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy: He’s the brawn and she’s the brain, though these two feud as much with each other as with their captives. Miranda Richardson does a great job with the voice of Mrs. Tweedy, catching just the right note of imperiousness. And her scheme to turn her prisoners into chicken pies is so audacious that it makes us chuckle even as we wince.

If the plot of “Chicken Run” owes a debt to “The Great Escape,” the Tweedys may have been inspired by characters from another movie of that same era--played by Angela Lansbury and James Gregory in “The Manchurian Candidate,” one of the great husband-and-wife acts in the annals of screen villainy. In that movie, just as in “Chicken Run,” the hubby is the henpecked buffoon, and the wife is the evil genius. Of course Mrs. Tweedy is only a cartoon version of the great Lansbury, but she stirs happy memories of a time when movies had scripts, actors had style, and villains were truly larger than life.