20 Recent Movie Villains Who Were Instantly Iconic
You won't forget these bad guys anytime soon.
Just as important as crafting a compelling movie hero is rustling up a worthy villain, because if the antagonist is a damp squib, it becomes a whole lot easier to not really care about the central conflict.
But a basically solid villain is one thing - the sheer confluence of circumstances that goes into delivering a great, even iconic all-timer antagonist is unfathomable.
Beyond the writing itself, there's casting the right actor for the part and then directing them to a phenomenal performance, while hoping that the film as a whole strikes a chord with audiences.
But sometimes a movie villain just has The Sauce, as the kids say these days, and you know from spending just a scene or two in their presence that you're watching something truly special.
And that's absolutely the case with these 20 recent movie villains, who near-instantly entered the annals of legendary, iconic movie villains, recency bias be-damned.
Regardless of what you thought of each film as a whole, these villains absolutely brought their A-game to the table, enough that they might've even left the hero choking on their dust...
20. Steven J. Lockjaw - One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson's superb One Battle After Another saw Sean Penn receive some of the best reviews of his career for his sublime, ultimately Oscar-winning performance as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw - a psychotic military officer who spends the movie pursuing the members of the revolutionary outfit known as the French 75.
While it would've been easy for a character like Lockjaw to feel like a pure caricature, Penn infuses him with so much unsettling physicality - his facial tics, his stilted way of walking - that he becomes a more distinct, and distinctly horrifying antagonist.
It helps that Anderson writes Lockjaw with considerable shade, for as monstrous as Lockjaw is, there's also a fundamentally pathetic quality to him, that he's so desperate to belong to a white supremacist outfit that he fails to anticipate their ultimate decision to assassinate him.
In a movie packed with brilliant characters and performances, it's Lockjaw who makes the deepest impression - a villain who is terrifyingly believable and yet just ridiculous enough to laugh at.