Pragmatic Villainy / Live-Action Films

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• The Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) remake has the crime lord Bishop, who makes it clear a few times that he's only helping the cops fight off the corrupt ones trying to kill all of them to save his own life. In the end, he's able to get away.
• In Avatar, the mining corporation uses the Avatar program as a tool of diplomacy to try to peacefully negotiate with the natives for their land and to research the planet. The company executive points out this was done because killing a tribe for their land would cause public relations problems. They'll only try to wipe out the Na'vi if they have to.
• The titular Blackbeard acts this way in the Hallmark Entertainment movie of the same name. When Maynard defends a rescued slave from a fellow pirate which escalates to an in-fight between the two, Blackbeard breaks it up and defends the action not because he particularly cares about the slave one way or the other, but because he feels Maynard "having a soft spot for stray dogs" isn't worth a fight among his crew and just doesn't want to have to deal with crewmates trying to kill each other. When the pirate won't let it go, he in turn chastizes Maynard for standing up for the slave not because he felt it was right or wrong, but because it created a problem that he'll have to deal with later.
• Sonny in A Bronx Tale is the only one who's willing to work and deal with black people for profit, while the more racist mobsters want nothing to do with them.
• Isaac from Children of the Corn (1984) allows the elderly mechanic at the town's only gas station to live in exchange for his fuel deliveries, and to dissuade outsiders from trying to enter the town and discover their secret. This lasts until Malachai decides there are no exceptions to the adult genocide, and has him killed.
• In A Clockwork Orange, the droogs begin to get tired of their sociopathic lifestyle and of Alex's leadership, but only because they want a more profitable return for their acts of ultra-violence. Alex, for his part, isn't interested in their plans to go into more organized crime, content with petty theft and occasionally beating and raping random victims for fun. The droogs later get employed as police officers for the brutal state they live under.
• All over the place in Con Air: The Big Bad Duumvirate is made up of an racist white Diabolical Mastermind and a Islamic black supremacist, and they are obviously not besties but work alongside each other for the common goal of getting out alive. They are also not fans of the local rapist, but tolerate him because they need all the able-bodied members for their operation. Even The Hero evokes this trope when he pretends to be on the villains' side by trying to save the hostages from being executed for fun, stating they need all leverage they can get.
• Constantine also has Satan help foil a rogue angel's plot to help his son unleash Hell on Earth, since being Satan is his job.
• In The Crow: City of Angels, one of Judah's underlings destroyed a large batch of Judah's drugs because it was killing off the people who used it. However, the guy spun the bad drugs as being bad for business, rather than being morally repugnant. Judah kills him with the bad drugs for his trouble.
• On C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, the Confederacy rejects Hitler's Final Solution because they consider it "a waste of human livestock".
• The Dark Knight:
  • The Chechen is upset with Dr. Crane for supplying him with fear toxin (which has horrific, non-pleasurable effects) as a street drug because his business needs repeat customers.
  • Likewise, the Mob wants absolutely nothing to do with the Joker until it becomes clear that he was right about the Batman breaking their psychological hold on the city... but by then it's too late for anyone.
• The Dark Knight Rises: At the climax of the movie, Talia and Bane have Batman wounded and captured. As she leaves to enact the final step of their Evil Plan, Talia tells Bane to keep Batman alive so he can agonize to the last minute over his failure. Bane nods in apparent agreement, waits until she leaves, and then casually says that he's actually just gonna kill Batman now because it would be foolish to risk him foiling their scheme. He is only stopped from doing just that by the intervention of Selina.
• Deep Rising: Mamooli makes it very clear that he'd like to rape Leila and asks to be her guard instead of Billy, almost getting into a fight with her boyfriend Joey over it. The other mercenaries tell him to "behave yourself", but only because they're there to do a job.
• In Django Unchained, after Django gives himself up, Stephen tells Django that his master has decided not to give him the usual punishment of castration since it usually results in the victim bleeding to death within seven minutes. Instead, he states that it'll be far crueler to give him to a mining company where he'll spend the rest of his days in hard labor.
• Emperor (2020): Plantation owner Randolph Stevens is a pitiless and venal man who has Shields whipped just to Make an Example of Them. However, he's only cruel when it won't cost him any money. After Shields escapes and becomes a symbol for the slave community and another slave owner suggests killing Shields' son to punish Shields, Stevens says "I've already lost one slave. I'm not destroying any more of my property." Later, after being offered four times a slave's value, he sells the boy to someone who plans to free him.
• Conrad Stonebanks, the villain from The Expendables 3. He's an arms dealer who cheerfully supplies all kinds of terrorists, warlords, and crime syndicates, but the one thing he won't touch is nuclear weapons.
  Conrad Stonebanks: Generally, I find people are a little too emotional for ownership. Besides, I'd hate for you to kill all my other customers by accident. Or on purpose.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: M is annoyed when his Dark Mistress Claire slits the throat of one of his goons before the guy could give a proper report on his previous run-in with the supposedly dead hero. While M is a Bad Boss himself, he's not Stupid Evil.
• Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall cronies in Gangs of New York were appalled by Bill the Butcher's attitude and methods because it's bad for their appearance and alienates potential voters. Unlike the xenophobic Bill, Tweed doesn't care if America is "invaded" by foreigners, so long as they vote for him. He also refuses to use the police to do his dirty work because, "The appearance of the law must be upheld. Especially when it's being broken."
• The Godfather
  • Vito Corleone defends his refusal to involve his family with the drug trade by claiming that his friends in the criminal justice system would quickly turn against him if they found out his business was drugs, as opposed to "harmless vices" like gambling or prostitution — though it's implied to be a matter of conscience for him as well. This is generally believed to be a reflection of the real-life decline of the Mafia.
  • Sollozzo: "I'm a businessman, Tom. Blood is a big expense."
• Heat: Waingro botches the opening armored car heist by executing a guard, forcing the crew to kill the other guards as well, turning what would have been a simple robbery into triple homicide. McCauley and the rest of the crew are outraged at him and try to kill Waingro later, less because of how senseless and evil his act of violence was, more because this act will surely bring more heat from the cops down on them. This becomes clear in context with the later bank heist when the robbers do not hesitate to shoot and kill the police that get in the way of their escape, but at that point they had no other options. McCauley and his crew are bad men, just not stupid men.
• Highlander: The Kurgan may be an Ax-Crazy immortal barbarian, but he does not kill indiscriminately. He kills the other immortals to claim the prize, but never really targets mortals. He leaves Candy the prostitute alive in defiance of Disposable Sex Worker, he did not kill Heather after raping her back in the 16th Century (and then arguably more did so as an act of dominance over Ramirez than anything else), and didn't even care to finish off the Crazy Survivalist who shot him with an Uzi. It's almost as if Kurgan associates so little with mortal humans that he sees no functional difference between killing them personally and sparing them to live out their years (and not killing them means he doesn't have to deal with the authorities).
• Interview with the Vampire, Lestat scolds Claudia for killing a seamstress, because now they will have to find someone else to finish the expensive dress she had been making.
• James Bond:
  • Goldfinger: Instead of stealing the gold outright as originally intended in the book, Goldfinger's true goal involves nuking Fort Knox, thereby making the value of his gold stockpile skyrocket even more. Since he has neither the time nor the manpower needed to empty Fort Knox, Goldfinger's plan is much simpler in the movie and even points it out to Bond.
  Goldfinger: Who mentioned anything about removing it?
  • On a smaller scale, he's also one of the few villains who has an actual reason to invoke Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? If Bond's MI6 and CIA allies found him dead, they'd simply send another agent to infiltrate Goldfinger's operation, but as long as he's alive and visibly close to Goldfinger, they'll assume he's still successfully undercover and stay away to avoid arousing suspicions. It works, too. Goldfinger simply hadn't counted on Bond persuading one of his employees to turn traitor.
  • A View to a Kill: A borderline example since the KGB is never portrayed as really evil, simply on the other side. Still, General Gogol sums up the sentiment quite well when he explains that Silicon Valley is far more valuable as a healthy target for his industrial espionage, than it would be if his rogue agent had succeeded in destroying it.
  Minister Gray: I would have expected the KGB to celebrate if Silicon Valley had been destroyed.
  General Gogol: On the contrary, Minister! Where would Soviet research be without it?
  • Licence to Kill: This is Franz Sanchez's philosophy, such as preferring to pay off politicians and the police rather than violently threatening them because eventually, he'd have them under his control, which will help his drug cartel work freely. He gradually slips out of it because of Bond's manipulations, starting to behave more erratically out of paranoia and damaging his own organization.
  • No Time to Die: This is No-Nonsense Nemesis Lyutsifer Safin's MO. When he want something done, he gets it done, without any unnecessary theatrics or stupidity. He wants revenge on Spectre, so he arranges to hijack their revenge scheme on Bond so that he can wipe them out in one move. He treats Obruchev, the scientist who made the weapon used in said scheme, with respect so that the latter has no incentive to betray him. He wants Blofeld dead, so he infects Madelaine with Heracles nanobots programmed to Blofeld's genome. While Madelaine ultimately backs out at the last moment, she ends up infecting Bond, who then infects Blofeld in a stranglehold, eliminating the head of Spectre without ever revealing who killed him. Finally, when he catches Bond off guard at the end of the film, he just shoots him - no monologue, just bullets. And while Bond does manage to overpower him, Safin makes sure to infect 007 with nanobots set to kill Madelaine and Mathilde, just to spite Bond. Tellingly, Safin manages to accomplish the one thing no Bond villain has achieved in the franchise - he kills James Bond!
• Juice: Raheem seems more concerned that killing Quiles wasn't part of the plan rather than the fact that they murdered someone.
• In King of New York, drug kingpin Frank White, after being released from a long prison sentence, decides to invest his saved money into schools and saving a children's hospital in a poor community, as well as donate money to a politician he believes would really help the poor citizens of New York. He does this not because he is now The Atoner, but because he wants to take a different approach as a Villain with Good Publicity. If not for a group of rogue cops deciding to take him down, he would've succeeded in his plan.
• In Lawless, Floyd Banner saves the life of Jack and Cricket from his goons, gives them a great fee for their moonshine (whose quality he is impressed with), gives them the address to the creeps who attacked Forrest and finally whacks his mook who almost killed the boys with a shovel while roaring that he has enough trouble from the law without starting a needless feud with a local tough crime family.
• Lord of War:
  • The Villain Protagonist, Ukranian-American arms dealer Yuri Orlov, at one point reveals he has never done business with Osama Bin Laden "not on any moral grounds" but because "back then he was always bouncing checks". In fact, he even shipped cargo to Afghanistan while they were fighting the Soviets. His rival, Simeon Weisz, would only sell weapons to those whom he wanted to see fulfill their goals. In the case of the Iran/Iraq War, he supplied both sides in hopes that they would both lose.
  • This is an interesting twist because both characters are pragmatic villains; it's just that their pragmatism applies to completely different situations. In the Cold War era in which Simeon rose to power, with every corner of the world being divided between two warring ideological superpowers, it makes sense that an arms dealer would pick a side and try to advance its interests. The post-Cold War world lacks any such organizing principle, and as such is ideally suited to Yuri's Equal-Opportunity Evil approach of selling to anybody who pays. Before the end of the Cold War, Yuri was a cheap hood; after the end of the Cold War, Simeon is an outdated relic.
  • Nearly all of the gangsters, drug kingpins, and warlords that Yuri does business with do not try for a Ballistic Discount because Yuri is a valuable supplier and killing him would not only eliminate the opportunity for return business, but serve as a giant red flag to other potential arms dealers that this particular client cannot be trusted. For instance, the warlord in Sierra Leone doesn't kill Yuri even after Vitali kills one of his allies and destroys half the weapons that Yuri brought him. He just swipes away half of Yuri's payment since he's still entitled to the other half.
• Mad Max: Fury Road: Immortan Joe isn't particularly concerned with making sure Furiosa suffers for defying him; his sole concern is the return of his "property." Even when Nux offers to keep Furiosa alive for him to exact vengeance upon her, Joe rejects that suggestion and insists that he simply kill her to ensure that the War Rig stops. His allies go further and question the whole endeavor; not for any moral concern, but because they don't think the goal is worth the resources expended.
• Benoit from Man Bites Dog doesn't like to kill children or rich people, and doesn't do kidnappings — not because he has some sort of standard, but because they bring too much attention (and, in the case of children, aren't "bankable").
• Man on Fire: Sanchez aka "The Voice" reveals to Creasy that he did not have Pita killed, since "a dead girl is worth nothing". Presumably, he intended to keep Pita until the heat from the failed ransom had died off and extort more money from her family, or sell her as a Sex Slave.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy, the "heroes" are all wanted criminals. When Rocket doesn't care about the lives that will be lost if Ronan succeeds in his plans to wipe out the galaxy, Peter Quill points out that they all live in the galaxy, so they all have a vested interest in stopping Ronan.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Yondu claims that this is why he didn't capture the Guardians for Ayesha so that she could kill them, saying that being involved in the deaths of a famous group of heroes, like the Guardians, would be bad for his and the other Ravagers' reputation — on top of getting the Nova Corp on their tail. Though half of the Ravagers understand the situation and agreed to this, the other half of the Ravagers refuse to buy this and believe that he's gone soft, leading them to mutiny against Yondu; even executing nearly all of his loyal Ravagers for this.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming:
    • Adrian Toomes points out that his weapons manufacturing and trafficking operation has survived for so long because they do their best to stay under the radar and not attract the Avengers' attention. When his employee Jackson Brice foolishly starts blowing up cars in public and generally making a spectacle of himself, alerting Spider-Man to their gang's existence (which would have brought in Iron Man if Tony didn't have a bad case of Not Now, Kiddo towards Peter), Toomes fires him and kills him (accidentally) when he starts making threats.
    • Small-time criminal Aaron Davis tries to buy a gun from Toomes and his gang so he could rob people, but balks at the high tech weaponry they offer him, pointing out that you don't need weapons of that caliber to pull off a simple mugging. Later on, he helps Spider-Man find Toomes' gang because he recognizes that the weapons they're selling are too dangerous to let out on the streets.
    "I just need something to stick up somebody. I'm not trying to... shoot them back in time!"
  • Captain Marvel: The Skrulls do not harm the people they impersonate. Even Keller is left tied up somewhere rather than killed. This serves to highlight that they're not evil like the protagonists believed them to be but also because, as Talos later says, killing people complicates their mission.
  • Avengers: Endgame: When Thanos orders his ship to carpet bomb the battlefield just to avoid an asskicking from Scarlet Witch, one of his minions, Corvus Glaive, protests, mainly because they and their own troops will also get caught up in the indiscriminate blasts. True enough, when Thanos proceeds with it anyway, not only does the Mad Titan lose a great deal of his army, but the magicians on the Avengers side are able to shield the heroes, greatly tilting the battle in their favor.
• Miracle on 34th Street:
  • Macy goes along with Kris's "send people to other stores because Macy's doesn't have it/doesn't have a good enough version of it" because it will make the store seem like a nice and friendly place, insuring greater profit. It leads to an arms race with Gimbels over who could be the "customer friendliest" store.
  • Another scene has a judge's campaign manager convince the judge to not declare that Santa Claus does not exist, because it will make the judge completely unelectable.
• Monos: The Organization is a brutal guerrilla faction who kidnap and kill people to further their goals. However, the Messenger gives strict instructions to the Monos that they're to take care of the cow they've been lent by the locals so that they can return it in the same condition. Otherwise, the locals will stop giving them things and start informing on them.
• In Mortal Engines, it's not villainy from London's standpoint, but the treatment of the inhabitants of Salzhaken shows shades of this. Despite cutting apart their home, London's loudspeakers promise they'll be given employment and food, while Valentine puts up one of the Gut workers on a charge after he assaults the former town's leader. Given the nature of London, it's likely less genuine concern than ensuring a revolt doesn't fester in the minds of conquered peoples.
• Pale Rider: "I want that preacher with a rope around him. No, wait, if we get too rough, we'll make a martyr of him, last thing we want to give them is a martyr to fight for."
• Captain Vidal from Pan's Labyrinth was shown to be disgusted after he killed two innocent hunters he's mistaken for rebels. Only because his men didn't check on them thoroughly, thus wasting his time, and killing innocent civilians would probably incite the townspeople to support the rebels.
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  • In The Curse of the Black Pearl, Captain Barbossa believes he needs the blood of Elizabeth Swann to remove the curse of undeath plaguing him and his crew. When he first tries the ritual, he simply takes a few drops of her blood, since he intends to keep Elizabeth for himself as a pirate bride.
    Barbossa: Begun by blood...by blood undone! (nick)
    Elizabeth: That's it?
    Barbossa: Waste not.
  • In At World's End, Cutler Beckett is critical of Davy Jones' brutal tactics against pirates, but only because Beckett wants at least a few pirates alive for interrogation. However, Beckett did avert this as he kept making and breaking deals even when keeping them would've been to his advantage.
    • He also immediately demands that Jones kill his pet Kraken, because, powerful as the beast is, it's just too dangerous to keep around.
• The Prophecy featured a pragmatic Lucifer (played by Viggo Mortensen) who has the angelic habit of perching atop things like a bird. Satan saves the main cast from an evil Gabriel, who was on a rampage against mankind. His own selfish motives being that a Heaven ruled by Gabriel would just become another Hell, "and two Hells is one too many".
• In Ready Player One, the IOI corporation has a presentation on their vision of changes to the virtual-reality world, including a passing, very businesslike note that they've calculated exactly how many advertisements they can flood an individual without inducing a seizure.
• In Red Dawn (1984), World War III breaks out and Soviet forces invade and occupy the middle of the United States. Local teenagers in occupied Calumet, Colorado, form into a partisan group called the Wolverines. Every time they make harassment attacks against the Soviet occupation force, the ham-fisted local commander executes random civilians to try to deter future attacks. Things get so bad that a counter-insurgency specialist, Colonel Strelnikov, is sent in to take over. While being scarier and more ruthless than the prior commanders, he starts off with a big meeting hall speech to his local garrison, ordering an immediate halt to civilian reprisals — simply because it doesn't work. He accurately berates them that all this did was generate local sympathy for the partisan fighters and embolden them to keep fighting.

  Strelnikov: "From this moment on, there will be no further reprisals against civilians. This was stupid. Impotence. Comrades, if a fox stole your chickens, would you slaughter your pig because he saw the fox? No! You would hunt down the fox, find where it lives and destroy it!"

• Pragmatic villainy is a theme with Jackson Rippner in Red Eye. At one point, he outright says he doesn't lie to Reisert because it wouldn't help matters, and would risk making things unnecessarily complicated, and he doesn't even really get angry with her until she complicates his plan. (Specifically, by trying to thwart it.) See also, giving her an aspirin between her waking up from him headbutting her into unconsciousness and making an important — to him — call, and letting her throat go when she says she can't breathe, all of which are conducive to his plan.
  "I never lied to you, Leese. You know why? 'Cause it doesn't serve me. We're both professional..."
• Reservoir Dogs: Played with. Mr. White and Mr. Pink disapprove of Mr. Blonde's killing spree...not because they have any qualms whatsoever about killing someone (they don't) but because they need a reason, even if that reason is "I'm fleeing the cops and you're standing in my way." Mr. Blonde appears to kill and torture For the Evulz. However, while it's true that his recklessness and lack of professionalism are their primary complaint, it's also clear that they both feel particularly bad about one of Mr. Blonde's victims who was "maybe nineteen...if that".
• In Resident Evil: Apocalypse the Nemesis spares the life of L.J. when he cowardly throws his gun down. Through its Robo Vision we see L.J's identification change from "Armed Civilian. Threat: Minimal" to "Noncombatant. Threat: None" when he does so. As a non-threat, why waste the time and bullets?
• A scene early in Rocky has the title character as a loan shark's legbreaker... chasing Bob down to pay up, only getting part of his debt's worth (it's all of what he has), going back and suggesting awkwardly that, y'know, if he breaks the guy's thumb, he gets laid off from his job and he can't make the rest of the money. The loanshark seems to accept this excuse.
• Savaged: Trey plans to keep Zoe as a Sex Slave, until West notes that doing so will bring Hell on them due to Missing White Woman Syndrome. He decides to kill her instead.
• Scanners II: The New Order: Commander Forrester dismisses Drak as a psychopath when he expresses to the Mad Doctor that they need new scanners to work for them. However, he does not disapprove of Drak's actions, using him as a hired gun at several points; it's just that someone who's obviously Ax-Crazy is more difficult for him to control. Not only does Drak casually expose Forrester's plans to David, therefore making the latter suspicious of and eventually turn against him, he later murders Forrester's second-in-command, Lieutenant Gelson.
• Frequently comes up in Schindler's List. Originally, Oskar Schindler plays this trope straight, being a profiteer who uses the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany to turn them into easily exploitable labor. Later, when he comes to care about them and actively tries to save them, he still invokes this trope by trying to convince the Nazis that his employees are more useful alive and working for the war effort. This both does and doesn't work: his factories remain open until the end of the war, saving the lives of many of his workforce. However, many of the people he tries to save still die throughout the film, killed by various Nazis who consider killing Jews to be an end in itself regardless of whether they might be more useful alive.
• In Self/Less, Albright says at one point that shedding initially was supposed to use artificial bodies, as advertised. The only reason they began having pre-existing people sell themselves for the process was because they have yet to figure out how to feasibly manage that. Once they do, he claims they'll switch to that exclusively.
• The Silence of the Lambs: Buffalo Bill only targets plus size women, which initially leads the FBI to believe he has some sort of fetish for them, but once Clarice realizes Bill plans to make a suit of Genuine Human Hide, she immediately deduces he targeted larger women simply because they give him more raw material to work with.
• Star Wars:
  • The Empire Strikes Back:
    • Boba Fett cautions Darth Vader not to kill Han Solo when the Sith Lord is torturing him because the smuggler is worthless as a bounty if he is dead. The objection is dropped when Vader offers to compensate Fett should Solo die.
    • Likewise, Vader stops Fett from shooting Chewie when he was having his tantrum in Cloud City's freezing chamber, considering having the Wookiee dead means he is useless as a hostage.
  • In A New Hope, after Wedge Antilles's X-Wing gets damaged, prompting him to leave the Death Star trench, Vader tells his wingmen to let Wedge go and stay focused on Luke. Earlier during the conference on the Death Star, this was likely the reason when Tarkin ordered Vader to cease choking Admiral Motti when Motti mocked the Force, seeing that Vader made his point and it would be a waste of time to kill and replace Motti for his petty opinions.
    • Vader allows the Millenium Falcon to escape the Death Star because he had a homing beacon planted that will allow the Death Star to follow it to the Rebel base's location and destroy the inhabitants.
  • In Rogue One, Krennic is ready to use the Death Star to blow up all of Jedha, but Tarkin settles for just destroying the capital city, since The Empire needs "a statement, not a manifesto". Later in the movie, Vader disapproves of Jedha City's destruction, since it creates unrest when the Empire is not ready to reveal the Death Star's existence.
  • Introduced in the prequels, the Rule Of Two imposes this on the Sith in an attempt to counteract their This Is Your Brain on Evil tendencies. Since the Sith creed encourages narcissism and megalomania, early versions of the order tended to end in Enemy Civil War. The Rule reduces it to two Sith Lords, a master and an apprentice, because that's the maximum number of Sith that can be together for any significant length of time without killing each other. Even then, the murder instinct will eventually come into play, but now it makes a Darwinian kind of sense: if the apprentice succeeds in killing his master, he's proved his worth and will continue the Order's legacy as the new master. If he fails and is killed, he wasn't smart or strong enough to deserve the title anyway, and the master will find a more worthy apprentice.
• In The Ten Commandments (1956), Moses is given charge of using slave labor to build Pharaoh's new treasure city. When he takes charge, he improves the slaves' food ration and gives them a day off to rest. When Ramses protests that he's being wasteful, Moses replies, "Cities are made of bricks. The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none," and then shows Pharaoh that the city is being built faster than before.
• While a Terminator generally has no scruples against killing anyone who stands between it and its primary target, the Terminators are inherently programmed to be infiltration units, meaning that they don't kill Innocent Bystanders when doing so would blow their cover and draw unnecessary attention to themselves that would hinder their mission. The only time civilians unrelated to the target get killed is when they resist a Terminator's robbing them of some resource it needs (such as their clothes) or the Terminator is firing through them at its target (as in the Tech Noir nightclub in the first movie). They also won't bother to go far enough to kill people in their way if merely incapacitating or swatting them aside is good enough or faster (like when the Terminator merely knocks out a police officer to steal his car rather than taking the extra second or two to outright kill him).
• In The Three Musketeers (1973), Cardinal Richelieu discusses taking revenge on D'Artagnan but says "Revenge is an expensive luxury. Statesmen cannot afford it."
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when Judge Doom and his weasels were searching the bar where Eddie and Roger were hiding, Doom nixed the weasels' suggestion to ransack the bar to find Roger because it would be quicker to get Roger to come out with the 'Shave And A Haircut trick', Toons being unable to resist saying "Two Bits".
• Wild River proves a somewhat meaner version than most. Knowing of the obstacle that she's posing to Chuck's project, Bailey says that he'll go out to the island himself and force Ella off if Chuck backs down about hiring black workers for the dam, which Chuck refuses to do.
• In The Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch of the West tries to steal Dorothy's ruby slippers, they produce sparks. The Wicked Witch decides to take a different approach:
  Wicked Witch of the West: Fool that I am! I should have remembered! Those slippers will never come off as long as you're alive. But's that not what's worrying me, it's how to do it. These things must be done delicately or you hurt the spell.
• X-Men: Apocalypse has the title villain coming to Storm's defense when she is about to lose a hand, in spite of him not really knowing what's going on. He sees a potential minion in her, and as such does not want her to come to harm.

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