Ranking Morgan Freeman’s villainous movies
Thanks to his dulcet tones, ability to make exposition sound like poetry, and the habit of being repeatedly cast in very similar roles, Morgan Freeman has hardly carved out a lucrative side-line as a villainous presence on-screen.
It’s a rare treat when he does, then, even if the results have been spectacularly mixed. When Freeman signs on for any project, there’s a guarantee of gravitas at the very least, but for the most part, his more memorable and acclaimed turns have kept him away from any noticeable shades of grey.
The mythology that’s been crafted around him as one of the industry’s marquee wizened sages may have a lot to do with it, but whenever Freeman breaks bad, it always feels as though he’s trying too hard to be convincing, which in turn has saw many of his nefarious turns come in subpar films.
With a legendary career that stretches back decades and boasts plenty of wisdom-dispensing goodness, the villains have nonetheless been few and far between, and many of them haven’t exactly been memorable.
Morgan Freeman’s villainous turns, ranked:
10. Vanquish (George Gallo, 2021)
The most recent years of Freeman’s career have seen him gradually slide into the straight-to-video realm, so it’s inevitable a villainous turn that never saw the inside of a cinema would end up at the bottom of the barrel.
Ruby Rose earned a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for ‘Worst Actress’ in Vanquish, which neatly sums up the movie’s quality. Freeman has lent his name to plenty of VOD dreck in a very short space of time, so there was little chance this one would be anything beyond dismal.
The veteran plays a wheelchair-bound former cop who holds the daughter of Rose’s character hostage to force her into working as a drug runner, and while he goes out in a blaze of glory by the time the third act rolls around, Freeman is quite clearly uninterested in going beyond autopilot.
9. Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan, 2003)
A box office bomb that comfortably ranks as one of the weakest Stephen King adaptations ever made, Freeman managed to enjoy himself in Dreamcatcher despite the film itself being unsalvageable extra-terrestrial nonsense.
“I don’t get to play bad guys, or semi-bad guys, often,” he mused to The Morning Call of Dreamcatcher, which is fair enough. However, it doesn’t explain why he was saddled with such a preposterous pair of fake eyebrows to play Colonel Abraham Curtis.
A deranged and nefarious military man seeking to contain the parasitic alien invasion unfolding in his midst, there’s plenty of scenery-chewing involved, but Freeman ends up being dragged down by the substandard shenanigans that surround him.
8. Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (Patrick Hughes, 2021)
If star-studded casts were indicative of a film‘s quality, then Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard would have been substantially better than it was, although watching it gives the impression everybody involved had fun making it. Unfortunately, very few other people did.
Freeman and his inimitable gravitas appear as the adoptive father of Ryan Reynolds’ Michael Bryce, who ends up being revealed as a baddie through his association with Antonio Banderas’ villain, Aristotle Papadopoulos. Left with no other option following such blatant betrayal, Bryce ends up killing his father.
With Reynolds, Freeman, Banderas, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Richard E. Grant, and more on its roster, there was no way Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard could have turned out more forgettable than its predecessor. And yet, somehow, it did.
7. Lucky Number Slevin (Paul McGuigan, 2006)
Arriving about a decade too late to the ‘labyrinthine crime thriller that ladles twists on top of turns’ subgenre, Lucky Number Slevin resolutely failed to match its ambition in the execution.
It’s become something of a cult favourite in the intervening years, though, and Freeman is evidently having a blast getting to sink his teeth into a shady underworld figure known only as ‘The Boss’, but there’s still not enough for him to chew on to make it memorable.
Convoluted to within an inch of its life, letting the sum of the rug-pulls breathe for a minute before moving on to the next one would have worked wonders, but director Paul McGuigan was all too happy to waste a stellar cast by barrelling through the revelations.
6. Chain Reaction (Andrew Davis, 1996)
As two of the most beloved stars in the industry, Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman starring in an action-packed disaster thriller with a technological slant sounds like a licence to print money, except it wasn’t in the case of Chain Reaction.
Barely able to recoup its budget and questionable in its scientific accuracy, to put things very lightly, Freeman’s kindly benefactor, Dr. Paul Shannon, secretly harbours ties to a company that wants to use the breakthroughs developed by Reeves’ Eddie Kasalivich for their own monetary gain.
He even guns down Brian Cox in cold blood to underline his villainy, but like many of his rare descents into malevolence, Freeman once again breaks bad in an altogether underwhelming production.
5. The Contract (Bruce Beresford, 2006)
Reuniting with his Driving Miss Daisy director Bruce Beresford did not reap anywhere near the same rewards the second time around, with Freeman sparring opposite John Cusack in a workmanlike and predictable thriller that signposts its twists from a mile away.
Freeman’s infamous contract killer is awarded the lucrative task of bumping off a billionaire but gets into a car crash before he can finish the job. However, when he’s sprung from supervised custody, Cusack’s ex-cop and his son get dragged into ensuring the assassination gets completed one way or the other.
It’s a decent enough setup, and Freeman as an elite-level assassin is nothing if not a novel change of pace, but there’s no excitement, no tension, no stakes, and no real value to be found across a 97-minute exercise in mundanity.
4. Hard Rain (Mikael Salomon, 1998)
Freeman actively warns people against the idea of watching Hard Rain, which doesn’t seem very fair when he takes it upon himself to change the movie‘s ending based entirely on the reaction of test audiences.
In the original cut, his thief was killed before the credits rolled, but the actor’s Jim ends up escaping at the conclusion of what’s basically ‘Die Hard in a flood’, with Hard Rain failing miserably at the box office despite the fact it’s actually pretty good from an old-fashioned practical blockbuster standpoint.
Not only did Freeman get the ending changed, but he’s barely even a villain anymore by the time he rows away to safety, although it remains up for debate if he pushed for that particular change to his character arc, too.
3. Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008)
There’s only one movie that features Freeman as the leader of a secretive society of killers who possess the ability to curve bullets and choose their targets by way of a pre-cognitive loom, and it also happens to be one that includes a very rare use of him deploying the word “motherfucker”.
Taking a leaf out of the Samuel L. Jackson playbook is reason enough to give Wanted a pass, although Timur Bekmambetov’s comic book adaptation does provide plenty of eye-popping thrills and tongue-in-cheek silliness to propel its story along.
In expensive blockbusters, Freeman hardly ever gets to play the bad guy, and by positioning him opposite the panicked James McAvoy and the cool-as-ice Angelina Jolie, he’s regularly in opposition to a couple of game scene partners who help elevate the ludicrous script with their straight-faced solemnity.
2. Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000)
Not for the first time, Freeman indulged his villainous side by playing a killer-for-hire, one who makes it his mission to erase Renee Zellweger’s title character off the face of the planet alongside Chris Rock.
The small-town waitress with big dreams is forced on the run from Freeman’s Charlie and Rock’s Wesley after witnessing the pair murder her drug-dealing husband, with the traumatic experience manifesting as a detached reality where she’s living life as a character from her favourite soap opera.
A winning twist on the road trip crime caper formula from Neil LaBute, Freeman remains dead-set on his mission right up until the final scene, where a standoff ensures that not everyone is going to make it out of the grand finale alive.
1. Street Smart (Jerry Schatzberg, 1987)
Securing his mainstream Hollywood breakthrough on the cusp of 50 years old, Street Smart landed Freeman the very first Academy Award nomination of his career, while simultaneously sending it to brand new heights.
He’s never played a character like Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls ever since, and that’s been entirely by design. Given his kindly persona and penchant for playing father figures and mentors, it’s jarring to see Freeman showcase his ruthless side as a hard-edged pimp with an axe to grind.
A ferocious turn that brings an impressive amount of charisma to the fore without ever letting the audience forget he’s an irredeemable human being, Freeman’s first time playing a bad dude in a major movie continues to endure as his very best.