10 Best Scenes When Evil Movie Characters Turned Good

And finally, we have the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) from Joss Whedon's Serenity - the shadowy Alliance agent tasked with capturing super-powered ass-kicker River Tam (Summer Glau).

The Operative is a textbook example of the banality of evil, because though he works in the service of a tyrannical super-government and will kill anyone who gets in his way, he's also extremely cool-headed and emotionally measured.

There's a creepiness to the civility with which he conducts himself which makes the character's actions that much more interesting, and yet despite his near-religious commitment to the Alliance, he's eventually convinced to sever ties with them through some good old-fashioned information.

After Mal (Nathan Fillion) subdues the Operative in a fight, he shows him irrefutable proof that the Alliance was responsible for creating the savage human mutants known as Reapers.

There's no attempt by the Operative to doubt the evidence or even attempt to cover it up: he simply responds by calling off the search for River, ordering repairs for Serenity, and vowing to quit the Alliance.

Though the Operative's cold pragmatism perhaps made him seem like a robotic Terminator of an antagonist, in the end it's exactly the personality trait which allowed him to quickly change his stance upon assessing the evidence.