10 Best Movie Antiheroes, Ranked

Movie heroes are great, and should be celebrated, and equally compelling are those characters who are outright villainous. Without the latter, there might well not be any conflict, and without conflict, the majority of stories would be uninteresting, if they even existed in the first place. But then sometimes, and for some genres, it can be more interesting to have a main character who rides the line between hero and villain.

Enter the antihero who, given “hero” is still in the name, probably leans more towards hero than villain most of the time, but will nonetheless still have an edge to them, or flaws that make them less squeaky clean than traditional heroes. They won’t be conventional heroes, but they do usually achieve more good than bad, and generally prove easy to root for in their own distinctive ways, as the following iconic movie antiheroes show.

10 Snake Plissken

‘Escape from New York’ (1981)

Escape from New York came out at a time when filmmaker John Carpenter was at his peak, with the release of this film coming right between Halloween and The Thing. Those films both gave audiences iconic horror villains for the ages, though Escape from New York differentiated itself by not being a horror movie, and for being a film where the most memorable character was the protagonist, Snake Plissken.

In a dystopian future, Plissken is blackmailed into getting the President out of a dangerous New York City that’s been overrun by criminal gangs. Plissken himself is also a criminal, and a very reluctant hero who nonetheless rises to the occasion but never stops being detached and bitter about the whole situation. It feels like the kind of role Kurt Russell was born to play, and he’s a huge reason why Snake Plissken (what a name, too) endures, even if the character has only been featured in two films to date.

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9 Wade Wilson/Deadpool

The ‘Deadpool’ movies (2016-2024)

Representing something new for the superhero genre, 2016’s Deadpool was the first proper time the titular character was introduced in film (X-Men Origins: Wolverine doesn’t really count). Before adopting the name Deadpool, Wade Wilson was a Special Forces operative diagnosed with cancer who underwent a risky experiment that was supposed to cure him, but instead disfigured him and gave him rapid healing abilities.

Throughout what’s now become a series, Deadpool does sociopathic and violent things, but ultimately targets people more violent and evil than him. On top of being rather sadistic, he’s also very sarcastic and continually breaks the fourth wall, addressing the absurd situations he gets into while poking fun at the entire superhero genre, all the while being at the center of some genuinely good superhero movies.

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8 The Man with No Name

‘The Dollars Trilogy’ (1964-1966)

Numerous Clint Eastwood characters can be considered antiheroes in one way or another, with the central character from the Dirty Harry movies and William Munny from Unforgiven being good examples. However, Eastwood’s most iconic antihero is likely the unnamed man from the Dollars Trilogy, someone who’s assumed to be the same person, even though he gets a different nickname in each movie.

The Man with No Name, as he’s been coined, gets involved in different adventures/misadventures across three movies: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He’s generally self-centered and shows himself capable of doing a handful of questionable things, but he usually emerges as the morally superior individual in any given conflict (though him being labeled “The Good” in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is more than a bit eyebrow-raising).

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7 Jef Costello

‘Le Samouraï’ (1967)

Le Samouraï is a movie about a lone assassin placed in a particularly sticky situation, on the run from both criminals and the law after he pulls off a hit. That hitman is the calm, collected, and effortlessly cool Jef Costello (Alain Delon), someone who’s certainly not a good person, at the end of the day, but has a surprisingly high number of redeeming qualities that make him easy to root for nonetheless.

It’s a film that’s had a clear influence on subsequent crime/thriller/neo-noir movies, and to this day, Le Samouraï still feels quietly intense and superbly stylish. Costello also finds himself seeking redemption and sticking to a personal code that he has as an assassin, ultimately sacrificing a great deal but staying true to himself… even if he does ultimately get paid to kill people.

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6 Ash Williams

The ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy (1981-1992)

Bruce Campbell will always be best known for the character of Ash Williams, who he played in three Evil Dead movies before also portraying him on TV, in Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-2018). To focus on those three original movies, though, it’s fun to see Ash grow and/or devolve as the films go along, as he’s a fairly hapless survivor in the first movie and a comically arrogant action hero by the third film.

Ash has seemingly been driven mad by the various clashes he’s had with the supernatural, and something within him certainly snaps at some point during Evil Dead 2. He’s quite a jerk by the time Army of Darkness comes around, but that film also sees him at his most charismatic and oddly endearing. He’s an unlikely, unlucky, and ridiculous hero through and through, and it’s hard not to love him, on some level.

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5 Max Rockatansky

The ‘Mad Max’ series (1979-2024)

Rather than any actor being at the center of every Mad Max movie, the true star who’s been a part of every film has been director George Miller, a filmmaker who keeps pushing the series to wilder and wilder places as the years go on. It’s also a series where the titular character sometimes plays second fiddle to others, emphasized most of all by 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, where Max himself only has a cameo.

Still, his name’s in all the titles, and he’s a great vessel through which to see the continually bonkers post-apocalyptic stories Miller creates play out. Max Rockatansky has an origin story of sorts in the first Mad Max, and then after that, he becomes a drifter who finds himself wrapped up in other people’s conflicts. He’s usually reluctant to help, and continually feels rebellious and self-centered in some ways, though he seems unable to keep preventing himself from caring about others.

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4 John Wick

The ‘John Wick’ series (2014-2023)

A series that’s been keeping the action genre alive over the past decade or so, the John Wick films deliver grand spectacle and take place within a fascinating world, with each movie getting more expansive and having bigger action sequences. Things kick off rather quietly, though, with the titular character losing everything and vowing revenge against those who he believes have taken away anything worth living for.

Wick kills too many people to be considered a traditional hero, with the number of lives he takes making the kill counts of most slasher movie villains look minuscule in comparison. But, on the other hand, he has a moral code he never wavers from, and he only targets people he thinks deserve his wrath (and, in later movies, it’s usually him on the run from people who want him dead, making numerous killings there look more understandable).

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3 Rick Deckard

‘Blade Runner’ (1982) and ‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017)

Han Solo was the first well-known Harrison Ford character to feel something like an antihero, especially in the original Star Wars, when Han was at his most selfish and reluctant to help (he turned around by film’s end, though). Then, with the Indiana Jones series, Ford played someone who felt more traditionally heroic. While not morally perfect, Indy did generally fit the archetype of a classic adventure film hero.

But then comes Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and with it, the character of Rick Deckard, who’s one of the most complex Ford’s ever played. Rick Deckard is framed as the hero, while the leader of the Replicants he’s tasked with hunting down, Roy Batty, is initially framed as the villain. But things twist and turn as the movie goes along, with Blade Runner doing an undeniably great (and very film noir-ish) job at blurring the line between good and evil through its two most prominent characters.

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2 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967)

The American gangster movies of old may have made criminals the central characters, but they were usually more villainous than heroic, or at the very least had their bad traits outweighing their good ones. Things were shifted radically by Bonnie and Clyde, which took the real-life bank-robbing duo of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and made them surprisingly heroic, even though they were criminals.

It was a new way to look at characters within crime movies, and they’re made sympathetic here, not to mention coming across as cool and charismatic, thanks to being played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. The Great Depression was a desperate time that called for desperate measures, with the title characters of Bonnie and Clyde turning toward a life of crime to get by, making them easy to root for, even with some of the questionable deeds they commit.

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1 Godzilla

The ‘Godzilla’ series (1954-2024)

Throughout a very long-running series, Godzilla has not always been an antihero, sometimes coming across as unambiguously heroic, sometimes being a tragic force of nature (Shin Godzilla), and sometimes being predominantly villainous (Godzilla Minus One). A good deal of the time, though, he occupies a moral space somewhere in the middle of all these, and it’s then when Godzilla starts to feel like an antihero.

Much of the time, this is due to Godzilla being the only thing that can stop a more powerful and more dangerous monster, with many Godzilla films being “vs.” movies that pit him against other creatures. With very few exceptions, he’s just about always easy to either pity or root for, even when he’s doing massive amounts of damage to the various cities he usually battles in. He’s surprisingly complex as far as giant movie monsters go, and that makes him a definitive nontraditional hero.

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