10 Movie Villains Who Actually Got Away With It
5. Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest's Nurse Ratched is a cold, hateful tyrant who rules over the hospital with an iron fist, making the lives of its patients more miserable than their various mental health conditions ever could.
Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy - a criminal who arrives at the facility after pleading insanity to avoid a prison sentence - makes it his mission to make the hospital a brighter place, and as a result, is drawn into a war with Ratched.
Their rivalry comes to a head when the firebrand nurse manipulates a young patient into ratting on McMurphy, an interrogation that results in the boy's suicide. This sends McMurphy into a violent rage, and he comes within an inch of strangling his adversary to death. In retribution, she has him lobotomised, leaving it to his friend and fellow patient Chief Bromden to end his life via mercy killing.
In the movie's final scene, it's implied that Ratched's power over her patients diminished after McMurphy's attack left her unable to communicate verbally, instead relying on a notepad to get her words across. But some might say she got off lightly.
Her victory over Nicholson's character was a hollow one that cost her power and status, but at the end of the day, she lost neither her life not her job while McMurphy spent his last hours virtually braindead before being shipped out in a bodybag.