BOO! HISS! Our volunteers pick their favourite movie baddies. (part 2)

Choice of baddies is, I suppose, inevitably subjective. But you see, I have an external measuring device which makes my results more objective, more rational. I have a kind of emotional Geiger counter that grades on a 0 - 10 scale. It’s called my partner, Jan. Let me show you how this works.

Gladiator

No. 1 Baddie: Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus in Gladiator.

When Commodus gurgled his last in the arena, the lovely gentle, joyful, never-a-bad-word-to-anyone person beside me leapt up and gave cry to a full-throated Meg Ryan, “Yes YES YESSSSS!! The cinema audience roared its approval. Mayhem!

11/10 on the Baddie scale (Spinal Tap rules apply here)

So that is how the Baddie counter works. Demise of villain resulting in sound / volume / emotional intensity.

Jaws

No. 2 Baddie: The Shark - Jaws

We screened Jaws at the end of our season, June last year. It had been a harrowing film for my Baddie counter. Like many people in Portobello, we swim in the bay throughout the year. When Chief Brodie blew the beastie apart, off went the counter, a joyful whoop of relief amidst noise of cheering from audience.

Baddie counter registered 7 / 10. 

And in third place, Alan Rickman as Obadiah Slope in the BBC serial The Barchester Chronicles; Alan Rickman as The Sheriff of Nottingham; Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber and Alan Rickman as Snape - perennial dodgy question mark in the Harry Potter series.

On my Baddie counter, Obadiah probably registered about a 6.5. He had that quiet malevolence of Shark. Rickman nearly hit that level again with Hans Gruber in Die Hard but there was something about Rickman’s badness that didn’t quite make it to the innermost rings of Hell. Its hard to explain. He just became really, really good at being really bad. There was just a hint of grease paint and pantomime about his baddie characters.