10 Movies That Wanted You To HATE The Hero

In the morally soupy world of Den of Thieves, it's tough to figure out who would pass as a genuine hero, because neither the focal cops nor the thieves are morally upstanding people at all.

Yet it's Detective Nick O'Brien (Gerard Butler) who is surely the closest thing we've got to a traditional action movie hero, but he behaves so deplorably that audiences are likely to want a shower after spending two-plus hours with him.

For starters, Nick is a flagrantly corrupt cop who shoots perps first and asks questions later.

Beyond that, he's a tornado of toxic masculinity and an absolute trainwreck of a human being: an alcoholic with a fractious family life who thinks nothing of eating a donut he finds at a grisly crime scene.

Butler plays the part with such hammy glee that we're almost persuaded to root for O'Brien as he attempts to stop Merrimen's (Pablo Schreiber) heist at the Federal Reserve, yet he's such a shameless degenerate that you're more likely to pull for the thieves.