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Villain Has A Point / Live-Action Films

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  • Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), due to the Enemy Mine team up between police and criminals, could be called "Villain Has A Point: The Feature Film". Most notably when two of the prisoners decide to abandon the group and make a break for it, and Bishop coldly points out that they could use them as cover to let two others get to a vehicle to get help.
  • The Big Lebowski: The titular Big Lebowski is right when he explains to the Dude that he had nothing to do with the damage to the Dude's rug and does not owe him a new one. After all, it was Jackie Treehorn's thugs that broke into the Dude's home, assaulted him, and peed on his rug.
  • Billy Madison: While Eric is a Corrupt Corporate Executive extraordinare and all-around sleazebag (to the point of literally having no knowledge of business ethics whatsoever), he correctly points out that the fifty thousand employees working at Madison Hotels probably won't keep their jobs for very long if an immature slacker like Billy is in charge, especially since Billy didn't actually finish school legitimately (his teachers were bribed into passing him). Not only does this temporarily convince Billy's father to hand the reins over to Eric, Billy decides after some Character Development that he's not cut out for managing a large company and gives it to Carl, who's a good businessman in both senses of the term since he's honest and competent
  • Demolition Man: Simon Phoenix is a total psycho, but even he is correct in pointing out that Raymond Cocteau's society is horrific. He'd rather have hellish chaos than sissy fascism.
    Simon Phoenix: You can't take away people's right to be assholes.
  • Detonator (2003): Steve Kirwin is angry at the police and feds because he wants them to answer for their misuse among vague happenings in Los Angeles.
  • In this deleted scene from Dogma, Azrael — a fallen angel trying to destroy reality and a general jerkass — makes a rather valid point about the abstract nature of evil.
  • Emperor (2020): Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee is a ruthless racist who has no qualms about putting down Brown's abolitionist rebellion, but he does validly point out that Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote "All men are created equal", was a slave owner who probably wasn't thinking of ''everyone's'' rights.
  • GoldenEye: When Janus reveals himself to be none other than ex-00 agent Alec Trevelyan, he points out to James Bond that he's an expendable asset to a government that doesn't particularly appreciate him, and to a society that doesn't particularly understand him, on top of ridiculing Bond for being "a loyal terrier to Her Majesty" who clings on to outdated ideals, whether he has qualms killing people, and losing allies during missions. 007 dealing with this reality after the Cold War becomes a recurring Central Theme in the Bond films made after 1989.
  • Heavyweights: Tony Perkins is an insane and abusive prick, but Camp Hope is supposed to be a weight loss camp and, before he came along, the campers were not making any effort to lose weight. The fat kids regularly smuggled junk food into the camp just so they wouldn't get thinner. While confiscating it wasn't a particularly nice thing to do, it is part of Tony's job. In fact, the first thing the camp does when Tony is locked up, is to celebrate with a junk food binge that makes them all sick. To the film's credit, it also directly says and shows that Tony's drastic, extreme measures toward weight loss are unhealthy also. When Pat is put in charge of the camp in the third act, they reach a nice middle ground of trying to lose weight and teach kids personal responsibility about their own diets.
  • The Hobbit: Smaug's comments about Thorin's greed and that the latter judged Bilbo's life "worth nothing" prove right on the money, given that not only did it take a What the Hell, Hero? for Thorin to even enter the Lonely Mountain seeking to save Bilbo, but when Thorin entered he actually held a sword to Bilbo when he didn't have the Arkenstone; to say nothing of Thorin's escalating Sanity Slippage after Smaug's death.
  • In My Country: De Jager is an unrepentant rapist, torturer, and mass murderer. Still, he is correct to point out that many people in authority knew exactly what he was doing and approved of it, and that his superiors and certain media figures are emphasizing his monstrosity mainly just to make him look like a rogue operator.
  • The Jungle Book (2016): While King Louie is trying to sway Mowgli whom he believes can teach him the secret of making fire, he shouts at one point "Don't run away from who you are!" As a man-cub who's been told to act like the jungle animals, Mowgli has his identity as a major struggle. Later in the climax, Mowgli decides who he is: after he extinguishes the torch he stole to fight Shere Khan and gets some coaching from Bagheera (who has earlier insisted Mowgli to repress his human creativeness), he defeats Shere Khan by fighting not like a wolf but like a man, embracing both his human nature and upbringing in the jungle.
  • Yuri Orlov, the eponymous Lord of War, is an amoral arms dealer who sells weapons to warlords whom he knows will use them to massacre innocent people. But, as he points out, plenty of innocent people are massacred without advanced weapons (the Rwandan genocide was committed primarily with machetes, for example), if he didn't sell them someone else would, and, as he points out to the Hero Antagonist Jack Valentine, a lot of his work is being clandestinely hired by the United States or other governments to arm people they don't want to be shown to openly support. The film ends with statistics showing that independent arms dealers don't even come close to the amount of weapons sold every day by nations like the US and Russia, who consider their arms dealing completely justified.
  • Mr. Jenkins from Mutiny on the Buses is a bully, but he's right that the Town & District Bus Company staff look unprofessional and sloppy.
  • Panic Room: Junior initially intended to pay Raoul a 100,000 fee for helping him steal 3 million dollars. After all the trouble they have to go through when Meg and Sarah barricade themselves inside the panic room, he demands an equal share of a three-way split. However, when it turns out Junior is still fleecing him and the money in the room is closer to 20 million, he shoots Junior.
  • Lampshaded in Plan 9 from Outer Space: at the end when the aliens officiously but defensibly describe humanity as "stupid and violent", one of the humans reacts by attempting to punch him out.
  • Return to Oz: The Gnome King. The emeralds of the Emerald City and all of Oz not only belong to him but were created for him. The people of Oz stole them, built their kingdom atop his, and refused to give them back. Per his conversation with Dorothy, she acknowledges that if someone steals something that doesn’t belong to them and refuses to give it back, violence is the correct response. Funnier considering she is threatening him with violence if he doesn’t relinquish his hold on Oz and The Scarecrow. If he weren’t such an A-hole, his actions would be entirely justified.
  • Road House (1989): Wesley suggests that Dalton secretly enjoys violence when he tries to recruit him. While Dalton rejects his offer in no uncertain terms, he is clearly a bit rankled when Wesley also brings up that Dalton once killed a man in Memphis and speculates that it was not entirely self-defense (Dalton was attacked, but he went overboard and ripped the man's throat out).
  • The Rock: The SEAL team who are sent after Hummel actually agree that the way the government treated his soldiers is inexcusable and Hummel has every right to be pissed of, even though the means he's using to force the government to change their minds is wrong.
    • When Hummel tries to appeal to Darrow's honor as a US Marine, Darrow retorts that when they chose to turn their guns on US citizens for money, they stopped being Marines and became mercenaries.
  • The Rocky series:
    • In Rocky III, Clubber Lang is outraged that Rocky won't allow him a shot at the heavyweight championship title and publicly accuses him of only ever taking easy matches. He's actually right: it turns out Rocky's manager Mickey has quietly been refusing all challenges to the title except those he knows Rocky can beat, and Rocky is shocked to learn this from Mickey himself.
    • In Rocky IV, Drago's jerkass Soviet handler bluntly tells Apollo that he's too old and been out of the ring too long to jump back into action with someone bigger, stronger, and younger like Drago, and Apollo is taking a big risk doing so. He's proved right in the worst way possible.
      • Later in the film the Soviets insist on having the match between Rocky and Drago in Russia, and Drago's wife Ludmilla says that she and the other Soviets fear for Drago's life should he remain in the United States. While this was likely an excuse, and the reporters present at the press conference jeer it, it's a valid concern; Drago just became the face of Soviet Russia as far as much of the Uniter States is concerned, and beat the beloved stand-in for Muhammad Ali to death in the ring. Staying in America, especially for a prolonged period to train and such, would come with a daily worry that some crazed person with a gun might try to take a shot at Drago. This is especially true since Apollo and company deliberately chose to market the exhibition bout with Drago as something of an International Showdown by Proxy, and stoked existing Cold War tensions and the country's Patriotic Fervor in doing so.
  • The Ruling Class: Charles Gurney schemes to get his lunatic nephew committed so that he can get control of the family fortune and so it comes as no surprise when he insists that his nephew isn't cured and is still as crazy as a loon. However, it turns out that he is right and Jack has only gone from insane to dangerously, murderously insane. Still, it is clearly more about him not wanting to give up rather than recognising the signs that Jack is now a homicidal maniac.
  • A recurring theme throughout the Saw series. As brutal and thoroughly inhumane as John Kramer/the original Jigsaw's methods are, they really have made most of the people who were put through his deadly games and survived to the end (or at least survived long enough to have some Character Development) appreciate their lives and untapped potential and desire to clean up their acts, even if only for a while. That being said, Saw II and III show that John's philosophy doesn't work for everyone (namely Amanda, who's been tested twice and never fully loses her self-loathing and self-destructive streak, to the point she's convinced herself that John's tests don't really change anyone), and that John's only solution to this inefficiency is to keep re-testing the people who don't change until they eventually die. Saw VI and 3D also feature Simone, a Jigsaw survivor who angrily calls out on fellow survivors for saying that their experience in a Jigsaw game have changed them.
  • Space Jam: A New Legacy: Al-G Rhythm may have been manipulating Dom as part of his Absurdly High-Stakes Game, but he's not wrong about what a Fantasy-Forbidding Father Lebron was for not supporting Dom on his computer skills. Even Lebron himself comes around to seeing how he neglected his son with his obsession in basketball and finally started making it up to him.
  • Surrogates: The Prophet/Lionel Canter might be resorting to extreme measures to make his point about the 'need' to restore humanity to its roots rather than living virtually through remote-controlled robots, but at the end, protagonist Tom Greer acknowledges his point to the extent that he deliberately avoids taking action to save the surrogates from Canter's planned attack, even if he prevents Canter's plan from being fatal to all those connected to their surrogates while simply shutting down the controlling network. He just manages to go about Canter's plan in a less mass-murdery way.
  • "Wallstreet" from The Transporter counters with one of these when Frank holds him at gunpoint and demands to know why he planted a bomb in his car to kill him. Wallstreet's response hits Frank hard enough to make the gun tremble:
    Wallstreet: You lied to me. You opened the package. You broke the rules. Your rules. What did you expect me to do? Recommend you for another job?

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