The bad guy wins.

[Joe Gioielli]

It all depends on the target market.

For the "atry farty" crowd, they would love it and feel it was just oh so cleaver.

For Joe Popcornpail, they want the good guy to kill the bad guy and ride off with the girl. Very heartwarming.

Skip cheap gimmicks, just shoot a good story.

Joe

[jpolzfuss]

IMO: If good versus evil isn't messy, you have an oversimplified story on your hands.

...in other words: you're just watching another typical "black vs. white"-hollywood-movie with no "gray" characters. ;)

[steve hyde]

...yes, that is how I see it. Gray is where the substance is usually found. The black and white characterizations always come off as didactic, politically correct or worse..

Steve

[camera8mm]

pans labrynth - banal ending.


the wild bunch - they get killed in the end. but look at who they are from the beginning - bank robbers. the anti heros.

[Angus]

...yes, that is how I see it. Gray is where the substance is usually found. The black and white characterizations always come off as didactic, politically correct or worse..

Steve

Which is why Star Wars works. At the beginning it seems straight good vs evil, which works for one film...then we find there's more substance to Darth Vader than we thought, and it becomes more interesting...enough to support two further films.

Usually, even when you have a "baddie" or "vilian" its best to have some background so you can understand why they became that way....which is why Tim Burton's Batman works so well, both Batman and the Joker are given (reasonably) plausible reasons for their chosen paths in life.

[audadvnc]

How about "Brazil"? The protagonist is tortured into a coma - or does he finally escape his pursuers?

Or "Fahrenheit 911"? Plenty of villians there. As a documentary it may not count, but as Steve & Nathan say, reality is messy.

[Lunar07]

What about Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth? The evil army captain kills the innocent girl.

J.S.

This whole good vs. evil guy thing is so hollywood and twisted.
In contrast:
The innocent girl gets her kingdom: she wins the ethical stand. she actually writes her destiny and takes charge of her own choices. I would not call that a defeat of the good guy. discovering rebellion is all about ethics. So is the case with the Wild Bunch. Or Zabrisky's Point.
A good story that does not cater to the Joe Blow of the day and his small town date along with the necessary soda and pop corn is never about a simple good vs. evil guy struggle. It is about the energy that organizes and channels our own perception of the world and our own ethical stands. This is what we call the Plot that goes beyond a mere synopsis of the story of good vs. evil. A good story is about well thought plots.
In the good vs. evil world of hollywood, Ophelia of Pan's Labyrinth may have lost. In the world of well defined ethical choices, she is the only winner.

[camera8mm]

i didnt care for the ending to pans labrynth. the girl gets her kingdom, but death is the ultimate escape from reality. the franco esque captain dictator is killed but the ideology of the revolutionaries in the forest (i'm guessing communist, fitting in with the spansh revolution theme), {but where they much better after seeing what happened in eastern europe and the soviet union pre and post wwII?} isnt explained except in bits and pieces (they killed their pows just as the army does)

[Actor]

For Joe Popcornpail, they want the good guy to kill the bad guy and ride off with the girl.

A quote from The Secrets of Action Screenwriting by William C. Martell.

The audience that's screaming for vengeance doesn't want to see the villain go to jail. They don't want to see him sustain critical wounds and die later in the hospital. They want to see him annihilated. -- The hero can't just shoot the villain, [sic] he must destroy him. The most satisfying villain's deaths involve exploding the villain into a million pieces.

[morales72]

Hi to all. I think of "Primal Fear", with Richard Gere as the commited lawer and Peter Norton as the psycopath (Aaron Stampler). Aaron gets away from prison and his lawer ends up with anguish. True psycopathic behaviour.

Best regards,

Morales

[Dr Smith]

I nominate Sergio Corbucci's Il Grande silenzio (The Great Silence) with Klaus Kinski's electric performance as Loco. One of my favourite Django era Spaghetti westerns's with an unforgettably dark ending.

[Actor]

I guess it all depends on what you call a "bad guy". I mean, caper movies like Ocean's Eleven are all about criminals that get away with the crime and win in the end. But if the criminal is likable then I guess it doesn't matter to the audience. In that sense, there are numerous movies where the bad guy wins.

Roger

Very good point. To clarify what I'm getting at let's discard the labels "good guy" and "bad guy" and substitute "protagonist" and "antagonist", where the protagonist is the person or group whom we expect the audience to root for (no matter which side of the law or morality he's/she's/they're on) and the antagonist is the one who opposes the protagonist.

To further illustrate what I'm getting at consider three alternate endings to three movies.

• The Terminator When the terminator gets up for the last time it manages to kill Sarah, thus insuring a victory for the machines. The next morning workers find the bodies and the now defunct cyborg with the chip.
• Psycho Norman manages to kill Lila and Sam. Their bodies and their car wind up in the swamp. Norman moves his mother back upstairs and assures her that everything's alright.
• Forever Evil Yog Kothag is victorius. Plausible since he is a god. In the final scene Marc (the new zombie) dumps Reggie's body in the trunk of the car and drives off.

[camera8mm]

how about any of the noir films?
chinatown.
kiss me deadly - no one wins -
for example.

[lastcoyote]

Oh Gosh, HBO just shown" The Skeleton Key".... Bad guys win it all.... Good person lose completely....!!!!