When we fall in love with a movie, it's usually because we fall in love with the characters contained within its frames - is it, after all, possible to have a truly great motion picture without truly great characters? Isn't it ultimately the characters that make a movie worth revisiting, after the gimmicks, special effects, or narrative complexities wear off? Cinema has, of course, gifted us with some of the greatest fictional characters of all-time: Travis Bickle, Don Corleone, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Ellen Ripley, Will Kane, Harry Callahan, to name but just a few legends. Still, despite the fact that the movie surrounding a central character might be great, it doesn't always mean that our hero is, too. Often, we can find ourselves duped by this notion... because the movie itself is memorable, we tend to overlook that - in a lot of cases - our protagonist is merely a connecting glue, devoid of any
true personality, a simple tool for leading us from point A to point B. That was the case in the 10 movies I've gathered here, for instance: all good-to-great movies that would have been greatly improved through the addition of a more memorable hero...
Please note: This list is ranked in order of how good the movies themselves were, from good to greatest.