10 Movies Where The Good Guy & Bad Guy BOTH Lose
4. A Simple Plan
Sam Raimi's criminally underappreciated thriller A Simple Plan revolves around brothers Hank (Bill Paxton) and Jacob Mitchell (Billy Bob Thornton), who along with Jacob's pal Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover a crashed plane with a bag containing $4.4 million in cash.
Now to be fair, Raimi's film is a morally soupy parable where true "good" and "bad" folk are tough to come by. Hank certainly makes his own fair share of mistakes, but is nevertheless the character we're supposed to root for as the trio's pact to keep the money a secret swiftly goes awry.
By film's end, the avalanche of bad decisions catches up with the trio. Jacob kills Lou to save his brother, and Hank subsequently kills Jacob at his own guilt-riddled request.
But at least Hank still has the money, right? Nope - he learns from the FBI that the money was marked, rendering it useless and ensuring Hank would've been arrested had he spent any of it.
As a result he burns the money and ends the story haunted by the trail of death and deceit the whole debacle caused.
As for the actual card-carrying villain of the piece - criminal Vernon Bokovsky (Gary Cole), to whom the money belongs - things don't go well for him either, as he's shot and killed by Hank also.