Magnificent Bastard/Film

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"I just did what I do best; I took your little plan and I turned it on itself." —The Joker, The Dark Knight

Examples of the Magnificent Bastard in film.

• Castor/Zeus from Tron: Legacy.
• The Joker from The Dark Knight is an unorthodox example of this trope. There's just something about the supreme competence and control he exhibits throughout the entire film that can make one forget (almost) that he's a Complete Monster. Joker Crosses the Line Twice. Hell, he dances a jig up and down the line.
  • When you manage to convince a man that it's not your fault you killed his wife-to-be, but the fault of those who were working to save both of them, and that it wasn't anything personal because you were just trying to teach Gotham a lesson in mayhem; all while WEARING A NURSE'S OUTFIT, you're a Magnificent Bastard. The best example, however is when he goes through his elaborate plot to kill Dent, gets locked up in jail, but manages to have a bomb in the stomach of another prisoner, which he sets off. Of course, he had to be a part of all this to make it work.

How about a magic trick? I'm going to make this pencil disappear! * WHAM* Ta-Daaaa! IT'S GONE!"

• • Which then leads to some degree of Fridge Logic when the Joker claims not to be a "schemer", and the Fandom supports this.
    • The implications seem to be that the Joker has tons of plans going on at once, that he will only put into effect when it seems interesting or fun to do so, while abandoning others because they're just so boring. He is a schemer, but an incredibly chaotic one as opposed to the orderly schemers he's up against.
  • The Book Of The Film gives the backstory of the crime boss known as the Chechen, who rose from being a penniless orphan in Chechnya to being a big fish in Gotham through the drug market and some luck. In the film itself, he's portrayed as having more sense than his Smug Snake colleagues, including being willing to hear Joker's proposition out and noting that he had a point about Lau. His only real downfall was being unable to comprehend the depths of Joker's madness and reasons for doing things, which he honestly cannot be blamed for.
• Addison De Witt from All About Eve. You know you've met a larger than life character when he has "wit" in his name. A Deadpan Snarker, Upper Class Wit and Chessmaster, De Witt is a theatre critic with astonishing power and influence. He can destroy the reputation of top actresses in a single column. Smug Snake Eve Harrington makes the mistake of crossing Addison and suffers a Villainous BSOD when he gives her a Hannibal Lecture.
• Ruthless businessman Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood, though he would be more of a Magnificent Bastard if he were more refined and less erm, hot tempered!
• Vito Corleone, The Godfather himself. Michael Corleone has his moments, but never quite measures up.
• Though possibly more of a Guile Hero, Danny Ocean from Ocean's Eleven exemplifies the protagonist angle of this trope. A persuasive, imaginative, charismatic and highly organized professional criminal with an impeccable sense of style, Danny Ocean pulls off an impressive Plan; robs the central vault of three casinos and gets his ex-wife to break off her relationship with the antagonist.
• John Dillinger from Public Enemies. There's a reason he's so hard to catch.
  • If you were to read the history of his real-life counterpart, he was arguably more awesome than the film depiction.
  • Also from another Michael Mann crime film, Neil McCaulay from Heat.
• Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects.
• Ozymandius of Watchmen, arguably moreso than his comicbook counterpart as his masterstroke doesn't rely on a fake, alien, psionic squid thing.
• Hannibal Lecter, who escapes being a Complete Monster by not eating people who are polite to him (which includes not insulting his intelligence by trying to outsmart him).
• Graham Marshall (Michael Caine) in A Shock to the System. He methodically murders his bitchy wife and sleazy boss, beds his beautiful coworker, gets her to help him cover up the crimes after she finds out he did it (and drugged her to create an alibi), rubs the homicide cop's nose in it, and in the last scene takes out the chairman of the board and takes his place. And does it all with a Deadpan Snarker narration that is 200-proof Michael Caine gold.
• One word: KKHHAAANNNN!!!!, Star Trek's best example of the Magnificent Bastard, though not the last.
• Senator / Chancellor / Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. Sith-ness notwithstanding, he managed to shape the entire galaxy in his image, had manipulated every major event for the past two decades or so, and had kept everyone assured of his respectability and trustworthiness while doing so. As he declared himself ruler-for-life (and was applauded by the Senate for doing so) he could justifiably claim to have earned it. And his start to political prominence was over a seemingly minor trade dispute. Which he started. Manages to be both this and a Complete Monster, since it helps he's motivated by pure ambition.
  • While he does get defeated due to not realising Vader cares for his son more than his duty, he still manages to have absolute authority for twenty-five years. Not just that, but he's the first Sith Lord in their five thousand-year history
• Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder. After discovering his wife Margot is cheating on him, he creates a complex plan to kill her while arranging a perfect alibi for himself and mentally punishing the man who cuckolded him at the same time. When Margot proves more resilient than he expected and kills the man he blackmailed into doing the deed, he only needs a few minutes to come up with a new plan to make it appear that she committed the act in cold blood. Even when his scheme is in danger of being exposed, he is quickly able to come up with a new way to turn the situation to his advantage. And finally when against all odds his whole plot is exposed, he turns out to be one of the all time great Graceful Losers, pouring wine for everyone who had a hand in finding him out (except a cop who he notes is still on duty).
• Leslie Vernon, from Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. He's an aspiring spree killer (in the vein of Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, as the movie is a big Deconstructor Fleet of slasher films) who is chosen to be the subject of a documentary that the main character, Taylor Gentry, is making. She eventually becomes great friends with Leslie, who turns out to be quite charismatic. Then, she is surprised when he does go through with the killings, his chosen victims trapped in a mansion that he pretreated to be lethal. She decides to help, but when she goes into the mansion, she realizes Leslie's real plan: she and her crew were also intended to be his victims, and they're playing right into his hands. Finally, she is the last victim left, and manages to kill him in exactly the way he said the final girl would. Unfortunately, he planned this the whole time, taking the preparations required to fake his own death...
  • And he even tells her how and by which means he is going fake his own death!
• Kuwabatake Sanjuro from Yojimbo. Not only does he play two rival gangs like fiddles, causing them both to collapse with little suspicion drawn to himself, he's able to turn his capture, which he didn't plan to his advantage.
• Harry Lime from The Third Man. "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax--the only way you can save money nowadays." And he's played by Orson Welles.
• Bill "The Butcher" Cutting from Gangs of New York has the hero at his mercy at one point in the movie, but instead of killing him decides to build him into a Worthy Opponent so they can have a Battle Royale With Cheese because having everyone living in terror of him is boring. Well, not quite. He lets the hero live because he considers him Not Worth Killing, who views being left alive by the Butcher as shameful. Which, in fact, may add to this magnificence. It helps that he's played with gusto by Daniel Day Lewis.
• Bill, namesake of Kill Bill, who drove his former employee/lover to come out of a 4-year coma just to kill him for his magnificent bastardry. Oh, and he put a "cap in [The Bride's] crown" AS she told him she was pregnant with his baby. Then proceeded to adopt that baby. Definitely magnificent.
• Chang, played with brilliant bastardliness by Christopher Plummer, in Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country. He banters with Kirk at dinner, claiming Shakespeare is best recited in the "original Klingon", and even as he's pounding the Enterprise to death while cloaked, he still has time to quote Henry V, Julius Caesar and finally Hamlet. Classy bastard.
• Hans Gruber from Die Hard holds a building hostage in order to trick the FBI into helping him steal huge sums of cash from it. That alone qualifies him. But when he's played with deliciously slimy charisma by Alan Rickman, well, Magnificent Bastardry ensues.
  • His brother, Simon Gruber, the Big Bad of Die Hard 3, proves that Magnificent Bastardry must run in the family.
• Ms. White from Inside Man. She's apparently made a career (or at least a lucrative hobby) of pulling strings and doing favors for the rich and powerful, so she can demand return favors in her own time. Early in the film, after she extracts a demand from the Mayor, all he can say to her is, "You are a magnificent cunt."
  • Dalton Russell would also classify. He takes a bank hostage and creates a foolproof plan to achieve his objective (hint: it's not robbing the bank) while escaping by literally walking out of the front door. Keith Frazier's entry into the plot doesn't even faze him. Russell merely modifies his existing plan and turns Frazier into an unknowing accomplice.
• Little Bill Daggett of Unforgiven. Play by his rules while in town, particularly by handing over your means of defending yourself, and he's smiling, affable, and friendly; charming, really. Cross him, however, and he'll first put you in a position where you can't fight back and then beat you within an inch of your life or kill you outright for sheer fun. He even has a speech mid-way through detailing that what makes him formidable isn't speed or skill so much as his willingness to stand his ground and count on his manipulation of the odds where other people would piss themselves with fear.
  • He has a speech detailing that what makes him formidable is that he takes the time to aim THE trait that makes all formidable gunfighters formidable to this day.
• Agent Smith of The Matrix. He "wants everything," and makes a perfect Evil Counterpart to protagonist Neo, as he stands out from other Agents, with actual personality and charisma.
• The Merovingian from The Matrix seems to fit the trope closer than Agent Smith. The Frenchman is cultured and honourable in keeping his promises, but he is still a bastard. His magnificence is mostly hinted at but he has colourful henchmen, a hot wife that he cheats on, digital love potions, an underground railroad, legions of minions, a chateau in the mountains etc.
  • Also, this is after surviving multiple reformats and rewrites of the reality he inhabits, most designed to (as a side effect) eliminate him or reduce his potential power. He's even gained Vetinari Job Security in the process, being the only undisputable leader for the variety of misfit programs ("monsters") under his control, though this became more relevant in the (defuct) MMORPG than it did in the films.
• Norman Stansfield in Leon / The Professional is a corrupt DEA agent who casually shoots up an apartment, tells the owner he stopped right in front of him because Beethoven gets boring after his overtures, and even convinces the cops that it was self-defense, despite a single person in the apartment having a gun. He's also played by Gary Oldman.
• Jackie Brown, who manipulates almost every character in the film against one another, while she steals millions of dollars and is granted freedom from prosecution, with only her lover the wiser.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Rotti Largo who planted poison in Nathan Wallace's home lab, thus killing the woman they both loved. Then he convinced Nathan that Marni's death was all his (Nathan's) fault and made him work as a Repo Man for Gene Co. And that's not much considering some of the other stuff he gets away with (and tries to get away with) in the movie. In a deleted scene he managed to get Shilo to extract zydrate from her mother's corpse.
  • Amber Sweet, Rotti's daughter, has shades of this as well.
• Evil, as portrayed by David Warner in Time Bandits, particularly during the final fight scene.
  • Jack the Ripper, also as portrayed by David Warner in Time After Time
• Al Pacino as John Milton (The Devil) in The Devil's Advocate
• The entire premise of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a competition between two con men to see which one is more of a Magnificent Bastard than the other. They both lose to an unknown third player.
• The Prestige features two magicians trying to beat each other with Magnificent Bastardry.
• Dr. Frank N Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show is this at times. He's able to manipulate two people whom he's barely met (IE: Brad & Janet) into sleeping with him, tricks said people into eating the remains of someone he killed out of pure spite (Meatloaf, anyone?), and FINALLY brainwashes not only Brad and Janet, but also his groupie Columbia and his own creation Rocky into performing a floorshow with him. All the while, for the most part, maintaining a very charismatic appeal to him.
• Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Billy Flynn
• From Thick As Thieves we have Keith Ripley, a master thief who has been manipulating the steps of Miami thief Gabriel Martin (Antonio Banderas) from beginning to end, in order to pull off a heist for some Faberge Eggs from a high security vault, and he does this with so much class that you have to just love the guy.
• Lacenaire, the poet, playwright and murderer from the French movie classic Children of Paradise is an outstanding example of this trope. He's proudly evil ("I'll hold my head high, until it falls into the basket"), spends the second half of the movie manipulating events even when they don't go his own way and treating the other characters in the movie as if they are figures from his plays, is charming and foppish to the point of dandyism (in the original sense of the word, he lives during the era when the term was coined), he's witty and calm even when the lesser villain, the Count of Montray, has him bodily ejected from a theater and he gets even with the count with first a Crowning Moment of Awesome and then a Crowning Moment Of Badass that must be seen to be believed. His real life namesake and counterpart was pretty salty himself, holding all Paris spellbound during his murder trial and inspiring writers like Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, who used him as one of his models for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
• More like Magnificent Basterd, Standartenfuhrer (Col.) Hans Landa, aka The Jew Hunter of Inglourious Basterds steals the show with his awesomeness and magnificence. Despite being a brutal, sadistic maniac tasked with searching all of France for Jews in hiding, his wit, intelligence, romanticism, and charisma make him the real star of the show, not Raine and his Nazi-hunting Basterds. By the end of the film he's managed to take credit for killing the Nazi high command and ending the war in Europe, and got a nice seaside house in Nantucket on the side, all while allowing everyone else to do the work for him. The only hitch in the otherwise flawless execution of his plan is the swastika permanently carved into his forehead and Raine's shit on his chest. Quentin Tarantino has remarked that Hans Landa might be the greatest character he's ever written, and considering this is the guy who created Jules Fuckin Winnfield, that's saying something.
  • This character was so complex and such a magnificent basterd, that ol' QT was worried that he'd be impossible to play (Leonardo DiCaprio was originally slated to play him). Luckily, he got the trilingual Austrian method actor Cristoph Waltz (who can also act in 4 languages), who really really got into his role, and won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival with a standing ovation. THAT is how awesomely magnificent he is.
    • Waltz also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2009.
    • One of the Jew Hunter's kids is studying to be a rabbi.
  • He's such a magnificent bastard that we are all essentially rooting for a man called the fucking "Jew Hunter." He even says that he likes his nickname, because he feels he's done everything in his power to earn it. Until later, when he reveals to Lt. Aldo Raine that he hates the nickname, and was likely just making the statement as a manipulation tactic.
• Nathan Muir of Spy Game may fit into this category. He demonstrates a certain amount of Chessmaster proclivities, risks his pension and his retirement to get his protege free, and manages to charm his way into the information he needs to get the job done.
  • The scene at the end, where his coworkers discover that he was never married, and he's been lying to all of them for years just for the hell of it, cements it.
  • The best intelligence agencies in the world don't even know his birthday.
• In Fracture, Anthony Hopkins' character with a bit of Gambit Roulette hatches a plan that allows him to shoot his cheating wife, hide the murder weapon, confess to his crime, have his charges acquitted and be immune against further trial, cause the suicide of the man sleeping with his wife, pull the plug on his comatose wife, and get away with it all. Until the last two minutes of the film anyway...
  • Which in all honesty, wouldn't get him behind bars. The evidence was obtained illegally, and he wasn't technically the one who killed her. The doctors did that, and if her death was ruled a murder, then it would mean that any and all doctors who have ever invoked a patient's "right to death" rights would have to dragged in on counts of murder.
• Vincent Price's title character of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Even more so in the sequel.

What kind of fiend are you? The kind that wins!

• Tyler Durden from Fight Club.
• Bricktop from Snatch, is really a near miss. He doesn't do much for convoluted planning, but he's a Complete Monster who nonetheless is quite funny, carries himself (and gives speeches) with style, is ruthless and willing to kill anyone in a second, and generally always seems to have control of the situation and be one step ahead of other characters. (For example take the following scene: Turkish has failed to come through on a favor to Bricktop and cost Bricktop a lot of money. Turkish runs back to his office, hoping he can get to his safe where he has enough money to flee Bricktop. Bricktop and his goons are already waiting there, they catch Turkish by surprise and have a surprisingly civilized conversation where Bricktop tells Turkish what Turkish will have to do in order to make things right, all while Turkish expects Bricktop to kill him at any moment. Then, just before leaving, Bricktop stops on his way out the door and says "Now, I know you came back here to open your safe" * Bricktop pushes aside a picture hiding the safe* "Well, now you can open it." The next scene begins with Bricktop counting all of Turkish's savings as he walks out to the car, knowing that he's left Turkish no escape and now virtually owns Turkish). Unfortunately, Bricktop's lack of planning comes back to bite him in the end, as he is badly, badly, Out-Gambitted by the movie's resident Wild Cards.
• The original working title for The Good the Bad And The Ugly was The Three Magnificent Rogues. If we assume 'rogues' is, here, an Unusual Euphemism for 'Bastards', it's a much more accurate description of the film's contents than The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ever was.
• If Mr. White of Quantum isn't a Magnificent Bastard yet, he's getting very close. In Casino Royale he was an unremarkable "next-link-in-the-money-chain" type, by Quantum of Solace, he's been upgraded to a Wicked Cultured, total Deadpan Snarker who laughs in Judi Dench's face while being tortured, can say "we have people everywhere" and mean it, and gets away scot-free at the end of the movie (though he'll probably get his comeuppance in the next one). Oh, and he was also the only member of Quantum to keep his head down when Bond was pwning all the other Quantum operatives during the Opera scene.

"Well, Tosca's not for everyone."

• • Dominic Greene. He fools the entire world by posing as friendly environmentalist, tricks Americans into helping Quantum couping Bolivian government for supposedly "oil" rights, and, finally and the most terrifyingly, totally rips Medrano off when the General disagrees with water contract. Should the General backs off, he'd wake up with his balls on his mouth, and his willing replacement stands over him. Medrano is just dumbfounded.
• Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies.
  • Gustav Graves of Die Another Day.
• Lee Woo-jin from Oldboy is this, through and through. Imprisoning Oh Dae-su for 15 years was only the start of his plan to ruin his life.
• Arguably Jareth from Labyrinth. The Large Ham aspect of this trope is definitely present. As is the manipulative part, as evidenced by his plan with the drugged peach. He's also very charismatic.
• Clyde Shelton in Law Abiding Citizen.
• Barbara from Notes On a Scandal, who's plan comes nearly to completion, after lots of manipulation. However, she was undone by her diary.
• Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the main character in The Bad and The Beautiful. The impoverished son of a legendary movie mogul who died bankrupt, he built up his own studio from nothing and made five Best Picture winners...and cheerfully stepped on everybody he had to in order to get it done. Some highlights: he got his best friend and creative partner to tell him all about his dream project, then stole the credit for all his ideas and gave the directing job to someone else; he recruited the alcoholic and mentally unstable daughter of a Hollywood legend to star in his next big movie, seduced her to get her through production sober, then started boffing one of the extras before the premier party was over; and he got his hot new screenwriter to finish his script by paying one of his Latin Lover leading men to seduce the guy's wife to keep her from distracting him...until the lover and the wife died in a plane crash the day they finished the final draft. So what's so magnificent about all this bastardry? In the film's final scene, all three of those people, who have gone on to become industry titans, agree to do one more film with him, saving his studio from bankruptcy. The man is just that damn charismatic.
  • Or maybe they don't; the ending is open.
• This phrase is used in the film Dead Man on Campus, in a reluctant appreciation of another character's immoral yet effective cunning.
• Obadiah Stane in Iron Man. He manipulated Tony Stark's kidnapping, sold weapons to both sides of an armed conflict, and was thorough enough to eliminate the witnesses not on his payroll. Who knows what else he'd been up to before the film started? If he'd just killed Stark instead of leaving him to die of heart failure, he'd have succeeded with his plans to mass-produce Iron Man units.
  • From another Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Loki in Thor. Manipulates the events behind his brother's banishment, then helps the king of the Frost Giants attack Odin only to kill him and launch what seems to be a justified attack on Jotunheim, all while keeping Thor in the dark on Earth. Like the above example, his downfall is in lying to Thor about what's happening in Asgard, as it motivates Thor to become worthy of his hammer and reveals Loki as the villain after Thor reunites with Sif and the Warriors Three.
  • Loki's status as a Magnificent Bastard is solidified in The Avengers when he kicks off the film by opening a portal, stealing the Tesseract, killing about a dozen people, and taking control of the minds of Hawkeye and Selvig. He later reveals his plot to seize control of Earth--all fueled by a personal vendetta against Thor.
• Gene Hackman's Herod from The Quick and the Dead. This magnificent bastard not only holds an entire town hostage as his own little kingdom, once killed a group of priests who nursed him back to health and burned down their mission, shoots and kills a boy who loves and looks up to him as a father, and was the man who forced a small girl (the protagonist) to accidentally shoot and kill her own father as she attempted to shoot through his hangman's noose (Y'know, for kids!), but he also hosts an annual picnic-and-quick-draw competition where anybody who wants to take a shot at him (literally) can do so (and most likely end up dead for the effort), all with an eat-your-heart-out smirk on his mug the whole time!
• While we're talking about Hackman, the man whose best roles are MB roles, let's not forget Mr. Royal Tenenbaum, Esq. of Wes Anderson's film of same name. A rotten husband who refuses to give his wife the divorce she requests, who worms his way back into the affections of his children and estranged wife by faking cancer, who is likely 90% responsible for the failures of his prodigious offspring, who introduces his adopted daughter as "my adopted daughter," who shot his own son (while on the same team, a fact he cavalierly dismisses) with a BB gun, and who starts a fight with the estranged wife's new beau by using antiquated racial epithets is still, somehow, mourned when he dies at the end of the film! A breathtaking and awe-inspiring bastardy magnificence.
• Tom Reagan from Miller's Crossing is a rare protagonist example as he plays both sides in a mob war to make sure his boss comes out on top. It works.
• Gordon Gekko is a notorious Magnificent Bastard in both Wall Street and it's sequel.
• Major Lemond (Ken Jenkins) in Air America pretty much openly admits to the visiting Senator Davenport that, yes, he is behind the drug smuggling operation in Laos, then delivers a pretty stinging Hannibal Lecture to him about how he'll still get away with everything.

You can't touch me without cutting your own throat! You know why? Because the president loves my ass!

• Everything about M. Bison in the Street Fighter movie is larger than life (except, of course, for his actor Raul Julia's slight frame). He kidnaps AN delegates to ransom them for seed money so that he can, among other things, build a mall (with the help of outside investors, no less!). Not to mention creating his own currency and valuing it against the British pound, with the justification that the British banks will honor that amount after he kidnaps their queen. And when his men capture AN soldiers intent on killing him? He turns them loose one at a time so he can fight to the death on live television! Not to mention that, for him, killing peoples' fathers is just a Tuesday. Raul Julia based his performance on Richard III from Shakespeare's play of the same name who was quite the Magnificent Bastard himself.
• Oddly (and infuriatingly) enough, Dr. Loomis was turned into one of these in the Halloween 2 remake.
• The Title character of Cecil B. Demented.
• Lady Van Tassel from Sleepy Hollow. Just, Lady Van Tassel!
• Disney movies also have some memorably clever villains in them...
  • Jafar from Aladdin. While he was a Smug Snake (and a literal one) in the first movie, he learned of his mistakes and graduated to a Magnificent Bastard in the second movie. The first thing he did when he was freed by Abis Mal was to play on Mal's greed for gold, fear for his life and his hatred for Aladdin in order to make him at first waste two wishes at nothing and then convince him to help him with promises of large riches and revenge on Aladdin. Once he had Abis Mal around his finger, he decided to force his former ally Iago to work for him again and use the trust Aladdin had developed for Iago into fooling him and the Sultan away from Agrabah into a trap, while himself took care of Genie and Abu. When the trap proved successful, he made it look like Aladdin had killed Sultan simply by placing it, slashed, in Aladdin's room, which would ended with him executed for the murder on the Sultan, seemingly ordered by a deceived, distraught Jasmine. If he had turned more attention on Iago's conflicting behavior, then maybe he would've been the one who won.
    • Even better. It wasn't a deceived Jasmine ordering Aladdin to be executed, she had already been captured. It was Jafar himself in disguise who gave the order. And he comes back in that same disguise just to reveal his true self briefly and rub it in Aladdin's face right as he's about to be executed.
  • Scar, from The Lion King definately counts. Well ... until he became The Caligula.
    • Oh definitely. He was arguably one of the most successful (if not THE most successful) Disney villain. He succeeded in his plans just halfway through the movie and had the benefits of those successes until the very end. Also managed to be a Complete Monster.
    • Zira from the sequel too.
  • Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty.
    • Maleficent could also be called a Complete Monster (almost literally so by the end of the movie), but her speech to Prince Philip detailing her revenge on him and the princess (i.e. hold him prisoner for a hundred years then let him rescue his true love as a decrepit old man) is magnificently bastardly indeed.
  • Shere Khan from The Jungle Book has the personality down, but really ascends to this in Tale Spin.
  • Professor Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective is an odd example who is both certainly this and a Smug Snake.
    • The same can be said of King Candy/Turbo from Wreck-It Ralph
  • Ursula from The Little Mermaid
  • Hades from Hercules
  • John Silver from Treasure Planet
  • Mother Gothel from Tangled
• Jack Sparrow, of Pirates of the Caribbean. Even his enemies can't help but admire his ambitious gambits... savvy?
  • • His former Bastard Understudy Hector Barbossa can outwit the rest of the cast when needed, but his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder makes him too predictable to match Jack. Jack lampshades this flaw near the end of the first movie:

Jack Sparrow: Me, I'm dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly. It's the honest ones you have to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're about to do something incredibly...stupid.

• • • Barbossa fully qualifies in On Stranger Tides. He actually makes you feel like cheering as he pulls off a Karma Houdini!
    • And who can forget Blackbeard, aka "The Pirate That All Pirates Fear"? Yes, he's a Complete Monster to the point that he flaunts it, but the twist is he's so stylish about it that even when he burns his cook to a crisp with Greek Fire and subsequently raises him from the dead via sorcery, tortures and manipulates a Mermaid into giving him a tear (before leaving her to die) and then threatening to kill his own daughter by Russian Roulette in order to get Jack to cooperate, you can't help but cheer for him. It also helps that he's one of the few characters in Pirates that can not only outwit Jack, but also outright reverse manipulate him (though Jack would triumph in the end through Xanatos Speed Chess).
• Riddick from Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick. He routinely makes it appear as if he planned each step. This is especially true when he is fighting the Lord Marshal and is able to think fast enough to figure out where he's going to be moving next.
• Depraved Bisexual Catherine Tramell of Basic Instinct.
• Jenner, from The Secret of NIMH. He's Affably Evil, as well as very competent, being one of the most successful movie villains in history, seeing how he succeeds in killing Nicodemus by cutting one of the ropes used to carry Mrs. Brisby's home to another location and causing the house to drop, drag him with it, and crush him under its weight. And not only that, he makes it look like an accident so that no one suspects his evil deed. Now, had he focused his attention on Mrs. Brisby warning the other rats of NIMH about exterminators coming to kill them, as well as Sullivan telling Justin about his plans, he would've gotten away with his plan to prevent the rats from moving to Thorn Valley. A strange case of a villain that happens to be a combination of both this and a Complete Monster.
• Matsu, protagonist of the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, has all the basic characteristics, plus a classic death glare and an iconic costume.
• Sarone in Anaconda, who plays every other character like a fiddle in his quest for the snake. Eric Stoltz is the only person who manages to outsmart him even once.
• Mike Wilson from How to Be a Serial Killer. A Trickster Mentor and Serial Killer extraordinare, with charisma to spare and standards.
• Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2 is as close to completely embodying this trope as you could get in an animated film.
• Mok Swagger from Rock and Rule. He's the biggest thing since World War III after all.
• Another rare heroic example is Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption. Upon discovering the deteriorating condition of the wall of his cell, he slowly (as in over the course of twenty years) carves an escape tunnel through it. Meanwhile, he works his way into the trust of the Warden, who is under the mistaken assumption that he is the Magnificent Bastard. Twenty years later, Andy escapes from the prison, taking a new identity--that he happened to create for the purposes of laundering the Warden's embezzled money, thus making himself a millionaire--and having the Warden and sadistic guard both arrested...all without mentioning a single word of his plan to anyone...not even his best friend. Andy is like the heroic version of Keyzer Soze, and gives us one of the most satisfying endings in film history.
• Swan. He has no other name. His past is a mystery, but his work is already a legend. He wrote and produced his first gold record at 14. Since then, he's won so many that he tried to deposit them in Fort Knox. He brought the blues to Britain. He brought Liverpool to America. He brought folk and rock together...Now he's looking for the new sound of the spheres, to inaugurate his own Xanadu, his own Disneyland...the Paradise, the ultimate rock palace. This film is the story of that search, of that sound, of the man who made it, the girl who sang it, and the monster who stole it.
• Sebastian Shaw from X-Men: First Class certainly qualifies. He is a well reputed businessman, masterfully manipulating America and Russia against each other to further his goals even improvising every single odd situation into his favour without losing his cool at all. He would have actually succeeded in his goal had he not killed Erik's mother all those years before hence forcing Erik to go on a literal roaring rampage of revenge
  • Magneto definitely counts. A brilliant schemer, manipulative to the bone, and manages to keep his cool even during the thickest situations. He even manages to pull a Xanatos-Gambit or two in the film.
• In Star Trek: Into Darkness John Harrison plays just about everyone with ease and style. And then it's revealed that he's Khan, one of the franchise's most magnificent villains. It was perfectly obvious that he would inevitably fit this trope with ease even before the movie was released.
• Benedict from Last Action Hero, an action-movie Big Bad who escapes into the Real World. Toward the end of the film, he becomes so Dangerously Genre Savvy that he's able to anticipate and exploit the genre-savviness of his rival Jack Slater.