No joke, one of the best villains

With what is becoming a typical NFL Sunday of late, I opted away from watching the blood bath on display by my team (see the opponent of Brett Favre yesterday) and instead waste away the day watching a movie.  While I’d seen it before, I couldn’t turn away from “The Dark Knight.”  Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance as “The Joker” got me thinking about the best badass villains from the big screen and while there have been many, Ledger ranks in my top handful for sure.

Let’s take a look at his role of the Joker: he robs a mafia-owned bank, rigs the heist so that all his accomplices kill each other, he kills the last one, takes only the mafia’s money, $60,000,000, and then personally confronts every one of the mafia bosses at the same time.

He lets on that he only robbed them to initiate a citywide war with one of the baddest crime-fighters in 20th Century fiction and then demands half of the mafia’s money in exchange for killing Batman, executing people daily throughout Gotham along the way just to make Batman take his mask off and give up.

Then on top of everything else, the “agent of chaos” actually has the nerve to justify himself to Batman. “I’ll show ya. When the chips are down? These uh…’civilized’ people? They’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under The Daily Muze.