CSotD: I <3 Villains
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It's been just over a year since Joe Staton and Mike Curtis took over and revitalized the venerable Dick Tracy franchise, and they've really hit a nice stride with shorter arcs and villains that are just evil enough to be villains and just silly enough to be fun.
Any nitwit can create a hero or a leading lady, perhaps because heroes and leading ladies as a group tend to be nitwits themselves, a fact continuously parodied by strips like Inkpen and Brewster Rockit and Rip Haywire.
The line between Batman and Ted Baxter is pretty thin, and, despite the best efforts of Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the rest of the dark gang, Adam West really wasn't that far off. As has been said here before, you really paint yourself into a creative corner if you try to make too much sense of a premise that, examined realistically, is kind of silly.
Within that universe of unrealistic premises, Marvel's revolution did create more nuanced heroes, but, even then, what was revolutionary in Spiderman became kind of tiresome when every hero spent more time wrestling with inner demons than with outer villains.
Those outer villains are where things can really shine.
Creating good villains — no, that is not an oxymoron — takes a deft touch. I began to hate modern villains, and not in the way we're supposed to hate villains, when I was watching "Rob Roy" and Tim Roth's character sodomized Mrs. Roy on the diningroom table. It was the same year that, in another film about a Scottish rebel, the villain, for no particular reason except to impress everyone with his evil, slit Mrs. Wallace's (Mrs. Heart's?) throat.
Really? Did you all sit around the writers' table slapping each other on the back for coming up with that nuanced revelation-of-character? And did you then speculate as to whether they might have had goalie masks in late medieval Scotland?
Compare that kind of over-the-top dumbass writing with George Sanders' conflicted villain in the 1952 Taylor/Taylor version of "Ivanhoe," or the way Claude Rains danced between the roles of friend and traitor right up to the last scene of "Casablanca."
Or Edmond Dantes in "The Count of Monte Cristo," whom you cheer as a romantic hero throughout the novel despite the growing awareness of how his revenge has metastasized from righteous to demonic, his once-noble mind twisted by years of captivity with nothing to do but ponder his betrayal, his demented, elaborate fantasies enabled by vast wealth and a dead soul.
Either give me a complex villain I must love and hate at the same time, or give me a playful villain I can hiss and boo like a kid at a Saturday matinee.
Having joyfully devoted themselves to the latter mission, Staton and Curtis are really putting the fun back in crime.
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