20 Movie Characters Who Never Got The Comeuppance They Deserved

One of the main reasons that we go to the movies is to escape from the mundanities and frustrations of everyday life, and perhaps the single most satisfying way in which conventional Hollywood differs from the real world is this: when someone does something s**ty, they bloody well get punished for it. 

In the real world, people get away with awful behaviour all the time. Happily, in many films - specifically, the more conventional, Hollywood-esque ones - bad characters get punished for their transgressions, and you love to see it. And, when you're expecting comeuppance for a villainous character and it never arrives, that is nothing short of infuriating, as the following 20 movies show. 

These cases vary heavily. In some instances, the lack of consequences for villainous characters hammered home their film's themes to harrowing effect, whereas the lack of payback in others felt like a lazy oversight. Furthermore, in other examples, the filmmakers didn't seem aware of how villainous certain characters really were. Regardless, all of these cases will leave you feeling thoroughly pissed off! 

Kicking off with a Disney Classic...

Disney animations have always soared high on their fairy-tale appeal; these are stories where good triumphs over evil, and the villains of the story get their just deserts by the end. At least, that's normally how it goes. Disney's sophomore feature, Pinocchio, subverted expectations here, as its most noteworthy villain doesn't get any sort of punishment. 

Well, Monstro the Whale is defeated by Pinocchio (Dickie Jones) at the end, but Monstro only appears in the final stretch. Throughout the rest of the story, the main villain is the fox Honest John (Walter Catlett), who leads Pinocchio astray not once but twice. He is perhaps the greatest test of Pinocchio's conscience throughout much of the film, and one could reasonably expect there to be some sort of final confrontation where Pinocchio finally learns to resist temptation. 

But no, not at all. After tricking Pinocchio into boarding a coach that takes him to that strange island where boys are turned into donkeys, Honest John disappears from the movie altogether and is never referred to again. Apparently, there were going to be scenes depicting John and his accomplice, Gideon, being captured by the police, but these were ultimately cut, which was arguably to the film's detriment. 

For all of the movie's considerable strengths, it doesn't have the sturdiest of plots, and adding more of a pay-off to Honest John's story would've gone some way in remedying this.