2. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) - Taxi Driver (1976)
Youve made it home. Your service is over, but as evidenced by The Deer Hunter youll be forever changed. But what happens if you dont have Meryl Streep and John Cazale to keep an eye on you? The answer is: Travis Bickle happens. Bickles idea of readjusting to normal life after witnessing the horrors of Nam is taking on the scum of New York in some ill-judged crusade, buying an elephant gun then using it to shoot off an old pimps hand and gut-shotting Harvey Keitel just for being a goddamned hippie. Clearly suffering from paranoid delusions likely brought on by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, Travis takes a date to a porno, befriends a teenage prostitute and embarks on a rampage of awful murder that echoes warfare re-enacted on the urban streets of America. See also Dead Mans Shoes ex-army Richard, who takes a similar Im mad as hell, and Im not gonna take this anymore-type stand against the drug-dealing filth littering his home town, cheekily killing them all in increasingly inventive ways. The way he fits a whole human cadaver into a suitcase is beyond commendable.