Well, the wait has been an excruciatingly long one, but this week it’s finally over – The Dark Knight, our long-awaited second installment in the head-and-shoulders best superhero franchise currently running, is here at last.

With it, of course, comes the most talked-about performance of the year: Heath Ledger, in one of his final film roles, as The Joker. From everything I’ve seen and heard thus far – and, man, has it been a lot – this is a performance that’s going to get talked about whenever people talk about the greatest bad guys in movie history, so this week I thought I’d take a look back at some other big-name actors who were at their best playing the worst of the worst.

Sir Laurence Olivier as Dr. Christian Szell, Marathon Man

Alright a knight, an Oscar-winner, and the best-known Shakespearean actor on the planet, the ever-dignified Olivier decided to add another title to his resume in 1977: scary-ass mofo. His ex-death camp doctor Christian Szell wasn’t even the main villain in William Goldman’s espionage thriller Marathon Man, but that didn’t stop him from handily stealing the show – the scene in which he tortures Dustin Hoffman’s in-over-his-head hero with a variety of cringe-inducing dental implements has become one of the best remembered squirm sequences in film history, and rightly so.
Olivier earned one of his many Academy Award nominations for the role, reportedly inspired by real-life Nazi torturer Josef Mengele, and also placed the innocent-seeming question, “Is it safe?” up there with the most terrifying lines ever uttered in the movies.

Henry Fonda as Frank, Once Upon a Time in the West

In the 30s, he played a fresh-faced Abe Lincoln. In the 40s, he played a lovestruck Wyatt Earp. In the 50s, he played the most levelheaded of the 12 Angry Men.
In the 60s, he played a dude who shot a little kid in the face, point-blank, then chuckled about it afterward.
Sergio Leone’s epic horse opera Once Upon a Time in the West conjures up one of the most dog-eat-dog western settings this side of Deadwood, and the baddest dog of them all is Henry Fonda’s sneering hired killer Frank – so evil, in fact, he apparently only needs a first name. What makes Frank such an icon of western villainy isn’t just his decidedly casual sadism – it’s also the fact that Fonda’s got such an fatherly, heroic-looking face, it makes the sight of him gunning down an entire family or violently having his way with co-star Claudia Cardinale that much more disturbing to witness. By the end of the nearly three-hour film, you’re clawing at the armrests waiting to see him get pumped full of hot lead.

Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, Blue Velvet

Nobody ever accused Dennis Hopper of being a particularly grounded guy, but his zoned-out characters in films like Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider at least seemed harmless enough to share a doobie with.
No so Frank Booth, the wild-eyed, sex-crazed, Roy Orbison-loving psychotic that makes Norman Bates seem positively well-adjusted. Played with a mix of soft-spoken menace and full-volume hysterical mega-insanity – sorry, but they haven’t yet invented a word that can accurately describe Frank Booth in a fit of rage – this character is terrifying even by the high standards of David Lynch’s wonderfully warped filmography, and arguably represents the finest work of Hopper’s lengthy career. Whether he’s dazedly lip-synching along to "In Dreams" with a fellow weirdo played by Dean Stockwell, beating the crap out of aw-shucks small-town protagonist Kyle MacLachlan, or horrifically redefining the “S” in S&M, this is one film character that you pray doesn’t have a real-life counterpart.
And, yes, I know that Dennis Hopper is probably the least-famous actor on this list, but I had to include him simply because Frank Booth would eat all of these other villains for breakfast – with a basketful of kittens on the side and a tall glass of anthrax to wash it all down.

Jack Nicholson as The Joker, Batman

Ledger may go down in history as the best onscreen Joker ever, but Jack Nicholson’s hedonistic perma-sneer perfectly suited the tone of Tim Burton’s original Batman film.
Nicholson demanded top billing to appear as the villain in Burton’s dark-yet-campy interpretation of pointy-eared hero’s origin story, and as good as star Michael Keaton was in the title role, ol’ Jack earned his top-dog spot in the credits with a performance that didn’t humanize the Clown Prince of Crime but rather played up his most entertainingly comic book-y qualities. Backed by Prince’s throbbing funk soundtrack and killer production design that perfectly realizes a sort of trippy cartoon version of film noir, Nicholson’s Joker is the loudest and most colorful instrument in a symphony of cinematic excess – and his work is one of the big reasons why Burton’s Batman still has plenty of admirers despite the overwhelming fan support of Nolan’s deeper, grittier caped crusader saga.

Al Pacino as John Milton, The Devil’s Advocate

Satan’s a character that tends to chew scenery in just about anything he shows up in – see, for instance, The Bible – so it’s surprising that it took until 1997 to cast Al Pacino as a thinly veiled version of Christianity’s number-one supervillain.
Trading the usual cloven hooves for a pair of thousand-dollar wingtips, Pacino plays the prince of darkness as a multi-millionaire Manhattan lawyer named John Milton, who bedevils innocent legal hotshot Keanu Reeves into joining his Satanic law firm (now that’s a redundant phrase, har har har) and does his bidding from a ridiculously luxurious office that would make Gordon Gekko green with envy.
Pacino doesn’t get to do his requisite screaming flip-out thing until pretty late in director Taylor Hackford’s overlong but trashily fun combination of legal thriller and religious horror flick, but his performance is an insidiously great one because he’s just way too damn persuasive about why being evil is so awesome – it might have been Billy Joel who said the sinners have much more fun, but nobody argues the point quite as eloquently as this sharp-dressed S.O.B. does.

I don’t get any pleasure out of saying so, but M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water is officially my least favorite movie of all time.

That’s not because it’s terrible – but, holy sweet crap is it terrible – but more because I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that Shyamalan, who’d seemed to be so in touch with his audience on films like The Sixth Sense and Signs, could be responsible for something so woefully misguided, self-indulgent, and unappealing on every conceivable level.

As bad a taste as that film left in my mouth, though, I’m still pretty psyched for his new film, the unexpectedly R-rated apocalyptic thriller The Happening, and – although it might just be wishful thinking – I believe it might be one of his best films thus far. Why? Because everybody makes mistakes, and many of my favorite filmmakers have rebounded from their biggest critical and popular disasters with some of their most highly regarded work. Just as Steven Spielberg followed up his ill-conceived and unappreciated 1941 with his now-legendary Raiders of the Lost Ark in the early 80s – and then, in the early 90s, bounced back from the one-two punch of mediocrity that was Always and Hook with the instant-classic Jurassic Park – I’m hoping that the embarrassing performance of Lady knocked some sense back into M. Night, and that’s why I’m dedicating this week’s Movie Match to great films made by great directors in the wake of their biggest disappointments.

John McTiernan’s Die Hard With a Vengeance

The Last Action Hero, a hopelessly inept combination of kiddie fantasy-fulfillment flick and crude satire of violent action movies, was a total snafu of a film, even with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the lead and ace action director John McTiernan behind the camera. Although it very well could have derailed the director’s career, however, just two years later McTiernan delivered a crackling second sequel to his 1988 hit Die Hard, teaming Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson for an explosion-heavy romp around New York City that stands as one of the best summer blockbusters of the 90s. With its over-the-top but expertly choreographed action sequences – the tunnel chase, especially, is an absolute jaw-dropper – and the highly entertaining chemistry between its stars, Die Hard With a Vengeance quickly reestablished McTiernan as a force to be reckoned with in the shoot ‘em up genre… though he’s yet to recover from a more recent string of bombs that includes 2002’s dreadful Rollerball remake.

Tim Burton’s Big Fish

Some classics can’t be touched, as fanboy favorite Burton learned when he unsuccessfully tried “re-imagining” Planet of the Apes back in 2002. While cool-looking, his poorly received Apes flick just didn’t have much heart – though his follow-up, 2004’s Big Fish, had enough of that for a dozen movies. Maybe Burton’s most sensitive and sentimental film to date, Big Fish (adapted by scribe John August) is a modern fantasy about a charismatic young man named Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) whose life is one tall tale after another; it’s also a touching and keenly observed story about coming to understand – and appreciate – one’s family, as strange as they might be. Deftly mixing fairy tale elements and eye-popping storybook visuals with a streak of warmth and humanity that surpasses even his own masterpiece, Edward Scissorhands, Burton bounced back from his misfired monkey movie with a film that has quickly become one of my all-time favorites.

Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2

Smith’s filmography has its share of both obsessive fans and bile-spewing haters, and the latter camp was probably thrilled with his dopey 2003 dramedy Jersey Girl – the detractors couldn’t have asked for a better argument as to why Smith should quit filmmaking and head back to the convenience store where he got his start. And, actually, that’s exactly what Smith did with 2006’s Clerks 2, a 12-years-later sequel to the vulgar black-and-white comedy that gave him his big break. Returning to the Star Wars references and MPAA-baiting dialogue that had once earned him the adulation of myself and other teenage guys all over America – but, this time, with an added dose of thirtysomething cynicism and melancholy that really helped round out his cast of knockabout blue-collar characters – Smith played to his own strengths and gave the fans what they wanted, rather than taking another ill-advised detour into Lifetime-movie territory. The result was one of the funniest and best-written movies of his career.

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

I enjoyed Stone’s overblown historical epic Alexander more than most folks did, but the film remains an extremely high-profile megabomb – and a costly one, at that. In Alexander’s wake, though, came the most earnest and least self-indulgent movie the unpredictable director had ever made: 2006’s harrowing and fact-based 9/11 drama World Trade Center. Made – shockingly – without a political agenda, the well-directed and inspiring film wisely narrowed its scope to focus on one incredible story at the center of an unfathomable day of tragedy: that of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (played in the film by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena), who struggled to stay alive underneath a horrific mass of rubble after getting caught under a collapsed tower during a rescue mission. One might have expected Stone to treat this subject matter with a lot more vitriol – his upcoming release, after all, is an incendiary George W. Bush biopic – but instead he crafted a well-meaning and refreshingly non-exploitative tribute to American heroism that silenced even some of his harshest critics.

Spike Lee’s Inside Man

Lee’s never been a filmmaker short on ideas, but he crammed so many into the loopy 2004 satire She Hate Me that the film quite literally collapsed under the weight; Roger Ebert, whose mediocre review was one of the only remotely positive ones the film earned, says it “contains enough for five movies, but has no idea which of those movies it wants to be.” Apparently, Lee learned a little bit about focus before returning to the big screen; his next effort, 2006’s Inside Man, was a tight, smart, highly entertaining heist flick that – while not amongst his most meaningful films – managed to score with one of his widest audiences yet. Solid central performances by Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, as well as some especially nice work from co-stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Clive Owen, round out an ingeniously plotted crime drama that leaves two confused cops (Washington and Ejiofor) scrambling to figure out just what the hell happened during one of the most enigmatic bank robberies in movie history. Who knew that, after proving himself as one of the most notable “serious” American filmmakers of his generation, Lee could also fire off a near-perfect genre pic without breaking a sweat?