The five most punchable movie faces
As Will Smith can attest, it’s not the wisest career move to inflict physical damage to a fellow industry professional, even if audiences have been left so seething by certain movie characters – fictional, it should be stressed – over the years that they’d love nothing more than to punch their lights out.
Whether any star in Hollywood has a punchable face in real life is a debate that’s entirely open-ended and down in large part to personal preference, but it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to the smug, self-serving, and altogether abhorrent figures on the silver screen who need nothing more than to be taken down a peg or two.
In the majority of cases, credit should go to the actors for making themselves so rampantly hateable, with the words on the page being raised to new heights – or lowered to new depths – by the way they’ve injected their characters with the intangible quality of deserving a right good battering.
Apologies in advance for the simmering rage that’s sure to follow thanks to the despicable nature of the following five, but at the end of the day, it can’t be argued that the first thing on everyone’s mind was just how much they’d love to plant one right on their jaws.
Five most hateable characters in cinema:
5. Carter Burke (Aliens, James Cameron, 1986)
An intergalactic snake oil salesman of the highest order, Paul Reiser’s Carter Burke remains the slipperiest sonofabitch in the entire Alien franchise, the ultimate company man who’d happily lie to everyone around him and send them to their deaths for the sake of appeasing his paymasters.
While it’s a testament to Reiser’s performance that he can play the ‘aw shucks’ middle-management type so well while simultaneously carrying a hidden agenda, the actor’s duplicitous doughy visage had the audience desperate to sock him across the chops long before his betrayal was discovered.
Constantly scheming, relentlessly projecting an air of sympathy, and flat-out lying to folks for toeing the company line so hard he’d ask how high if Weyland-Yutani ever asked him to jump, the most disappointing thing about Burke getting his comeuppance is that it’s never clarified exactly how he gets it.
4. Commodus (Gladiator, Ridley Scott, 2000)
Although it seems counterproductive to argue with the person who directed the thing, the number of people who agree with Ridley Scott’s assessment of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus in Gladiator better be counted on one hand, or there’s something very wrong with society.
The filmmaker referred to him as “the most sympathetic character of all,” and while he’s entitled to his opinion, Commodus using his daddy issues as a way to justify his scheming, petulant, deceitful, conceited, murderous, and jealous ways doesn’t excuse his behaviour or eminently punchable face.
Phoenix fully understands the assignment, though, which is what makes him such an easily detestable figure. Everything from his body language to those facial expressions reminiscent of a sulking child just makes everybody want to punch him even more, and his moment of judgment is a real fist-pumper as a result.
3. Caledon Hockley (Titanic, James Cameron, 1997)
With his perfectly tailored ensemble, immaculately coiffed hair, and pearly white teeth, Billy Zane’s Caledon Hockley was already on his way to all-timer status as one of cinema’s most punchable characters before the Titanic even struck the fateful iceberg.
A wealthy industrialist with a deep-seated disdain for the lower classes and a nuclear-level arsehole happy to lord it over everyone he deemed beneath his level, Hockley took his rampant shithousery to the next level when he usurped somebody else’s child and used them as a way to cheat himself onto a lifeboat.
Sick of being undermined by a future husband she had no interest in marrying, Rose was more than happy to jump right off the boat instead of spending another moment in his company. Needless to say, it’s not a far-fetched reaction when most folks would do the same if they had to see that face every day for the rest of their lives.
2. Colonel William Tavington (The Patriot, Roland Emmerich, 2000)
Few actors in cinema can sneer to the same degree and with such animosity as Jason Isaacs, which was put to excellent use when he curled his top lip while making life a misery for Mel Gibson and his rebel forces in Roland Emmerich’s war epic.
Striking just the right balance between Shakespearean and scenery-chewing, Isaacs brings unbridled levels of upper-crust bastardry to a performance that’s cold, calculating, ruthless, sadistic, and completely uninterested in treating anyone he speaks to beneath his station as anything less than the shite on the bottom of his shoe.
By all accounts Isaacs is a very nice and personable chap in real life, but somebody should make a point of remastering and re-releasing The Patriot as a virtual reality experience for the sole purpose of giving viewers the chance to slap the taste right out of his vindictive mouth.
1. Percy Wetmore (The Green Mile, Frank Darabont, 1999)
Being the most hated person on death row by both prisoners awaiting their execution and his colleagues alike would be an impressive achievement were it not for Doug Hutchison’s Percy Watmore being such a loathsome turd of a human that incandescent rage is the first thing to come to mind whenever he’s in the frame of Frank Darabont’s second stellar Stephen King adaptation.
Wearing his status as the governor’s nephew like a bulletproof vest, Percy operates under the impression that he can be a complete and utter wanker on a cosmic scale because there’s nobody brave enough to tell him otherwise. Even when he pisses himself out of sheer fear and cowardice, he leaves on his own terms after intentionally botching an execution for his own sick amusement.
It might be within a fictional setting, but a person needs to be the scum of the earth to irritate Tom Hanks, and Percy fits that bill. For audiences the world over, his beady-eyed face and rampant case of small man syndrome make him the most punchable figure in silver screen history.
