Top Five Movie Anti-heroes: The Five Best Anti Heroes
The Five Best Anti Heroes: 1. Travis Bickle
"Are you talking to me?"
Very obviously coming in at number one is Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle. Travis Bickle is a loner who drives his taxi around the city at night akin to a vessel travelling through hell. His commentary about the scum of the city and how a 'rain' needs to come and wash them all away serves as a pretext to one of the most realistically violent and tense shoot outs in film history. What makes Travis Bickle so effective is how difficult he is to predict when you do not understand him, and how interesting his thought patterns are when you do. Travis Bickle comes in at number one on this list of the best anti heroes.
The Five Best Anti Heroes: 2. Tony Montana
"Say hello to my little friend"
The Cuban immigrant who would rise through the ranks of the drug trade to become a drug lord, Al Pacino's Tony Montana is almost just a flat villain. His only truly redeeming action throughout the whole movie is not killing a family when he intended only to kill the father. However, despite this, Tony Montana remains one of the iconic antiheroes of film and deserved second place on this list.
The Five Best Anti Heroes: 3. Dirty Harry
"Do you feel lucky, punk?"
If cinemas role is to allow us experiences that should not be allowed in reality, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan represents society's pent up frustration with legal system inadequacies. Harry is a detective working to catch a serial killer who shoots people from the top of city buildings. The killer demands money or his killing spree will continue. Ultimately, no legal attempts to apprehend him are successful and Harry then resorts to illegal tactics to finally defeat him. The feeling of inadequacy of the legal system ultimately makes the audience very much on Harry's side, despite his anti-hero qualities.
The Five Best Anti Heroes: 4. Richard B. Riddick
"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?"
Vin Diesel's Riddick made his first and best appearance in the movie Pitch Black as a murderous prisoner being escorted to another planet. The ship crashes and the people that survive are forced to cooperate with each other and Riddick in order to survive the hostile planet. This works wonderfully as a plot device, with the audience never sure whether Riddick will inevitably betray the group in order to save himself.
The Five Best Anti Heroes: 5. Snake Plissken
"Sad story. You got a smoke?"
Kurt Russel's Snake Plissken is another iconic antihero and fifth on this list of the top five anti-heroes. An ex-special forces operative turned bank robber and inevitably inmate, Snake Plissken has every anti-hero quality under the sun. He is strongly misanthropic, a tough survivalist and always looking for a way to help himself.
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