10 Best Scenes When Evil Movie Characters Turned Good

One of the most common tricks a movie can pull is having a character make a surprising shift in allegiance, whether turning from good to evil (heel turn), or leaving the dark side to join the light (face turn).

They're both tough conceits to pull off, with the latter proving especially tricky given how easy it is for a villain's last-minute change of heart to seem contrived or overly sentimental.

Countless movies have committed the cardinal sin of forcing a heroic turn even if it didn't suit the natural state of the character - looking at you, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - but when it works, it really works.

These 10 movie scenes all saw card-carrying villains changing their tune, whether deciding they were fed up of working for a tyrannical outfit, having a soul-shaping "I'm the bad guy?" realisation, or changing sides in the face of new evidence.

While so many cinematic face turns fail to convince, these ones proved both entertaining and dramatically satisfying...

Jaws (Richard Kiel) is one of the most iconic villains in the history of the James Bond franchise, a seemingly indestructible assassin-for-hire who won't think twice about using his steel teeth to make short work of his target.

Jaws first appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me as a more serious and imposing character, but after children wrote letters to director Lewis Gilbert asking why Jaws had to be bad, Gilbert decided to plot a face turn for the follow-up, Moonraker.

Though Jaws spends most of the movie working for megalomaniacal villain Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), a number of comic relief scenes were written to soften his character, namely the introduction of a love interest by way of the adorably pint-sized Dolly (Blanche Ravalec).

But Jaws still remains in Drax's employ until the very end of the movie, when he realises that Drax's plan to exterminate "imperfect" beings would result in both his and Dolly's deaths.

At that moment, a mixture of conscience and self-preservation instinct kicks in, as Jaws incapacitates Drax's lackeys and teams up with Bond (Roger Moore) and Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) to help topple the supervillain.

Though many of Jaws' scenes in Moonraker are a little too goofy for their own good, his third act face turn absolutely isn't one of them, and helped cement him as a fan favourite for many 007 fans.