A Lighter Shade Of Black / Film

• Quentin Tarantino's films (both directed and produced) at their darkest descent into this type of conflict.
  • From Dusk Till Dawn: The Gecko brothers are a bunch of scoundrels worthy of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, but when compared to diabolical bloodsucking monsters, they can possibly be the guys you'll want to root for.
  • Kill Bill: The villains are ruthless assassins (though in the present, half of them have retired) and attacked The Bride at her wedding rehearsal, slaughtered everyone present, before mercilessly beating her. The Bride herself used to be one of them, an assassin, merciless, and with a sadistic streak. This trope is best summed up by Bud, who is the one of the only ones to admit that what they did was wrong, "That woman deserves her revenge. And we deserve to die. But then again, so does she."
  • The Hateful Eight: Every member of the titular group of characters has a questionable past and is not exactly the nicest person, though while Daisy Domergue is a murderous criminal searched dead and alive, while the other characters are at least lawful citizens. Till it turns out not to be the case - only bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren, John "the Hangman" and Chris Mannix are really what they say to be - the rest of the bunch turn out to be Evil All Along and part of Daisy's gang, further invoking this trope between both parties.
• In the two Alien vs. Predator movies, the Predators are this to the Aliens. In the first movie, not only does this lead to an Enemy Mine situation where the last surviving human character teams up with the last surviving Predator, but it's made abundantly clear that the Predators are by far the lesser threat, as the Aliens will cause global extinction if they reach civilization (which, as many have noted, invalidates the famous tagline "Whoever wins... we lose"). The second film is a bit better about this trope, with the Predator gruesomely killing a fair number of people without an Enemy Mine in sight, but to the humans, it remains a significantly smaller problem than the Alien swarm in addition to the many Evil Virtues of its species.
  • A lot of the victims the Predators kill in many of the films and video games are Asshole Victims: either gang leaders, thugs, criminals, rapists, or child-abusers (this is evident in Predator 2 where the Predator was killing a bunch of gang leaders and their henchmen). The Predators follow a strict code of honor and even helped develop some of the greatest civilizations in history (i.e. the Aztec Empire, Ancient Egyptians, and the Khmer Empire). The reason the Predators are considered antagonists is because many of the protagonists in such works are law enforcement officers or military personnel (which the Predators consider to be Worthy Opponents since many of them are capable of fighting back).
• In Beast (2017), Moll is seriously unstable, and it's revealed that she lied in claiming she stabbed the girl in self-defence, which makes it ambiguous how much of a bully she was, and she fantasizes about killing the victims. However, she still gets revenge on Pascal and ensures he can't hurt anybody else by killing him after he confesses to being the killer.
• The Big Short: The big banks and Wall Street are clearly the villains, but the protagonists are greedy opportunists trying to profit off a global economic collapse. However, some of them have more morality than others:
  • Mark is a Jerkass, but he hates how Wall Street rips people off. Once he realizes that the global economy will collapse, he tries to find some sort of moral absolution and seems dismayed that neither he nor any of the other bankers will face any comeuppance.
  • Charlie and Jamie are two normal guys who come across the whole thing by chance. When their mentor tells them just how many people will be affected their actions, they're appropriately horrified and try to warn the press about it to little avail.
  • Ben Rickert is the most moral of the main characters. Even though he helps Charlie and Jamie, he never profits off of the collapse himself. When Charlie and Jamie celebrate over how much money they've made, he's quick to tell them about the consequences of what they've done.
• Every character in Conspiracy (2001) is a Nazi and have enthusiastically engaged in war crimes, so they're all evil. Yet Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger, while still a proud servant of the Fuehrer who's glad to oppress the Jewish people, is the only one appalled by the concept of complete extermination. This is a Historical Hero Upgrade for him — the movie is about the Wannsee Conference which discussed details of the Holocaust, but the records (admittedly compiled by those in charge of the proposed measures) show that nobody objected to the genocide at the time, not least because it was already well underway — the point of the conference was not to start the Holocaust, but to make sure it happened efficiently. Kritzinger did try to resign soon after, but whether and how it was related to the conference is anyone's guess. He was ashamed about the whole thing after the war though.
• All the main characters in The Death of Stalin are morally questionable at best, being high-ranking members of Stalin's inner circle, and a bunch of brutal authoritarians. However, in the Evil Power Vacuum left after Stalin's death, some definitely come off better than others.
  • Between Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrentiy Beria, Khrushchev comes across as the much better option and the much more sympathetic character, having a few scruples and a reformist agenda, while Beria, leader of the sadistic Secret Police, is a Serial Rapist driven solely by self-interest. Most of the other characters whose support they are vying for, particularly Georgy Malenkov, come across as petty, cruel, and/or stupid.
  • The character who comes across as the most genuinely decent is probably Stalin's daughter Svetlana, who has no real power and is constantly being manipulated by the men around her for her Loved by All reputation with the Soviet people.
  • Finally, there's Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who comes across as fairly likable, being a down to earth soldier who, in his own words, "fucked Germany" and also (refreshingly) has no time for the political double-talk and scheming of the men around him.
• The German movie that Conspiracy was based on, Die Wannseekonferenz, gives this role to Stuckart, except much more downplayed. He's proud of the fact that his office has produced five pounds of legislation restricting Jews in everything. His only beef is with evacuating German Half-Jews with the rest. They number seventy-two thousand out of eleven million, just under two-thirds of one-percent.
• In Freddy vs. Jason, Jason is often read this way, since at least he's not a children-killing scumbag with pedophilic undertones who stretches out his victims' deaths out of sheer sadism. That and Freddy can go just about anywhere whereas Jason only sticks to his home place. Jason's motive for becoming a killer is to avenge his mother whom he truly cares about, while Freddy is pretty much unable to love anyone. On the flip side, Jason racks up a way bigger body count than Freddy does (which is actually Freddy's motive for fighting him — he is killing kids Freddy has targeted), is clearly out of control, and is slaughtering teenagers by the dozen seemingly For the Evulz, so... Also, on a metaphysical level, there's the fact Freddy explicitly steals the souls of his victims, whereas Jason just kills people.
• In the Godzilla continuities where Godzilla is more of an Anti-Villain, his opponents tend to be much worse in comparison, allowing the audience to root for him despite being a destructive, rage-filled monster who's killed countless thousands of innocent people, because at least Godzilla takes rests between his rampages. Films that fit this description include Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, Godzilla 2000, and Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Blondie, the "good," is hardly good by normal standards — he's a bounty hunter who is nearly as ruthless as the people he hunts — but unlike Angel Eyes (who is a complete sociopath) and Tuco (basically an amoral thug, albeit with a few humanizing moments), Blondie has moral standards. He is disgusted by the carnage of the Civil War and in the end decides to spare Tuco's life.
• Goodfellas: Henry Hill is a proud gangster who never directly kills anyone and is relatively sympathetic through most of the film even though both his associates and enemies are very nasty customers.
• Hayley Stark in Hard Candy is a sociopathic Manipulative Bitch whose modus operandi is driving her victims to kill themselves...but she only targets child predators, such as the male protagonist. It seems to be up to the viewer to decide who to root for, until it turns out that Jeff did it.
• Caine in Menace II Society is just as much of a criminal living the thug life as his friends, but he is portrayed more sympathetic, with a backstory of him being born into a bad disfunctional family and surrounded by negative peers and influences all of his life. He acts as the Only Sane Man of the group, and just when he's about to do a full Heel–Face Turn he is gunned down in a driveby shooting.
• Orphan: First Kill: Esther and the evil Albrights have no moral high ground over each other, but Tricia covered up Gunnar's murder of his own little sister and are overtly xenophobic and classist against Esther for being Eastern European as well as using ableist terms to disparage her dwarfism... all this while forcing her to play into their cover story while mistreating her. Also, Esther was originally content with just leaving the family and abandoning the charade and had no intentions of hurting them initially—notable for someone who had already murdered a family.
• I See You: Alec is a dangerously disturbed young man due to his unresolved severe childhood who increasingly develops a taste for terrorizing the Harper family, and it's even implied he was going to sexually assault the unconscious Harper teen when his madness reaches its height before Mindy stops him. But Greg, the serial child predator who abducts, tortures and kills boys, is unquestionably much, much worse than Alec even without the fact Greg is willing to kill anyone to cover up his true colors, plus it's implied he's actually responsible for Alec's behavior since Alec was a past victim who escaped him. Ultimately, Greg tries to kill Alec and frame the latter for his crimes, and Alec kills Greg in a mix of vengeance and self-defense.
• In Suicide Squad, while the titular team consists primarily of criminals and psychopaths that have basically been co-opted by the US Government as a black ops unit, faced with the threat posed by the Enchantress, who seeks to completely destroy civilisation, the Squad eventually make a choice to stand against the Enchantress even when they don't have to, with Word of God affirming that the film is, at its core, drawing a line between the Squad being bad guys while the Enchantress is just evil.
• The Way of the Gun:
  • Our protagonists Parker and Longbaugh are simple thugs who kidnap a pregnant woman to collect a ransom from a mob accountant. They're evil, but not without a sense of honor, and never plan to harm the pregnant woman, which contrasts with other characters in the film.
  • Jeffers and Obecks are both ruthless mob bodyguards who plan to betray their employer. However, Obecks is subtly shown to be less awful than Jeffers. When the pair point their guns at a woman's pregnant belly as a threat to her would-be kidnappers, Obecks surreptitiously calls her attention to the fact that his finger isn't on the trigger, showing her that it's a bluff, at least on his part. When he pulls her behind cover during the ensuing firefight, he whispers "You're okay" to her. Jeffers never shows any humanity contrasting with the pair's ruthless actions.

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