10 Crime Movies with Stupid Characters (original) (raw)
The main characters on the poster of The Big Lebowski (1998)
Image via Gramercy Pictures
Published Jun 30, 2024, 12:45 PM EDT
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A continually reliable way to make a crime movie also function as a comedy is to populate it with characters who are, bluntly put, idiots. It’s not a requirement of crime/comedy hybrid films, and there are crime films with more serious elements that also have characters who aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but the comedy genre and on-screen stupidity seem to go hand in hand.
Gangster movies of old tried to avoid glamorizing crime by showing its consequences, usually through rise-and-fall narratives, but it’s been a little trendier in recent decades to deglorify crime by making criminals look like fools. The following movies do this well, each having some (though not necessarily all) of the characters come across as bumbling and/or a little lacking in the common sense department.
10 'Fargo' (1996)
Directors: The Coen Brothers
Steve Buscemi in Fargo - 1996
Image via Gramercy Pictures
Fargo is perhaps the film that best demonstrates how good the Coen Brothers are at making movies filled with stupid characters that aren’t frustrating to watch. The villainous characters here are all out of their depths, trying to execute a fake ransom to get money from a wealthy man, only for so many things to go wrong, leading to chaos, double-crosses, and eventual deaths.
Things turn around when one of the few intelligent characters in the entire film, Officer Marge Gunderson, enters the picture and steadily uncovers who’s behind the series of violent events, then sets about putting a stop to them. Seeing justice enacted upon clueless criminals (while also finding comedy in the mess they make) proves immensely satisfying, and anyone who enjoys that aspect of 1996’s Fargo and wants more is in luck, given the anthology TV series of the same name unsurprisingly scratches the same itch.
Release Date
March 8, 1996
Runtime
98 minutes
Director
Joel Coen
9 'Clue' (1985)
Director: Jonathan Lynn
The cast of Clue looking out an open door.
Image via Paramount Pictures
The movie might be called Clue, but none of the characters seem to have one. But that’s for the best, because otherwise, this classic 1980s film wouldn’t have much of a runtime, with things being fun because of the chaos central to the whodunit plot, placing a group of characters inside a confined location and having them try to work out which person among them committed a murder.
Clue might well be the best movie adapted from a board game out there. Granted, that’s not saying a ton, but it’s something, and Clue is a good deal better than you would expect it to be (and better than reviews at the time of its release suggested, too). Which characters are stupid and which ones are just acting stupid on purpose depends on the ending, too, with Clue being novel for having three different endings, and those seeing it during its original theatrical run got one of them at random.
Release Date
December 13, 1985
Runtime
94 minutes
Director
Jonathan Lynn
8 'Pulp Fiction' (1994)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
John Travolta as Vincent raising a needle that he's about to stick into Mia's chest during the famous overdose scene in Pulp Fiction
Image via Miramax
Without a doubt, Pulp Fiction is brilliantly written, but that doesn’t mean the characters themselves have brilliant minds. Not everyone in Pulp Fiction is stupid, but it is a film that blends three crime-related stories, and in each one, certain characters make mistakes that ensure messy situations explode into further chaos, branching out and pulling in more and more people.
Bruce Willis’s character, Butch, messes up and runs into the same gangsters he’d just screwed over and was trying to escape from, but his mistakes have nothing on John Travolta’s Vincent Vega. He does something dumb in all three stories, failing to keep his drugs in a secure location in the Mia Wallace story, accidentally shooting Marvin in the face, and then being unprepared while tracking down the aforementioned Butch, which has fatal consequences for Vincent.
7 'The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!' (1988)
Director: David Zucker
Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin in front of an explosion in 'The Naked Gun'
Image via Paramount
Though 1982’s Police Squad! regrettably lasted just six episodes, the series managed to continue on the big screen a few years on from its cancelation, thanks to the trilogy of Naked Gun movies. Of those, 1988’s original, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, is certainly the best, centering on the clueless, stoic, yet somehow effective Lt. Frank Drebin as he thwarts criminals and causes absolute chaos.
The Naked Gun is an almost perfect parody movie, packed with non-stop gags and using every second of its runtime to set up or execute some kind of stupid, brilliant, brilliantly stupid, or stupidly brilliant joke. Drebin is far from the only idiot character in the film, too, with Officer Nordberg being even more accident-prone and oblivious (while being not nearly as lucky as Drebin tends to be).
Release Date
December 2, 1988
Runtime
86 minutes
Director
David Zucker
6 'Burn After Reading' (2008)
Directors: The Coen Brothers
Brad Pitt as Chad Feldheimer dancing in Burn After Reading
Image via Focus Features
2008 once again saw the Coen Brothers making a dark comedy about criminal levels of stupidity, with Burn After Reading amusingly coming out just one year after their significantly more serious Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men. The plot involves a disk that’s thought to contain valuable information which could then be used as a way to extort money, but nothing ends up going to plan.
Burn After Reading has a large cast and a very unpredictable series of events to the intentionally messy story, with various tropes and clichés associated with crime and spy/thriller movies being gleefully subverted. It’s all quite nihilistic, much like the aforementioned No Country for Old Men, but a good deal sillier and more humorous, so long as you don’t mind your comedy being dark and sometimes blood-drenched.
Release Date
September 12, 2008
Runtime
96 minutes
Director
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Main Genre
Comedy
5 'Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels' (1998)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Moran discussing in a bar in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Images via Gramercy Pictures
Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was the first of numerous gangster movies Guy Ritchie directed, and might well still be the best thing he’s made to date. There’s a huge number of characters featured throughout the relatively brisk film, none of whom exhibit much intelligence while ceaselessly pursuing some ill-gotten gains from a heist that wasn’t particularly well-executed to begin with.
Like many Guy Ritchie movies, Jason Statham appears here, and is surprisingly funny, with everyone else being more than up to the task of playing various stupid characters. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels has style as a film, but few of the individual characters could be considered cool, and it ends up being a good deal of fun to watch them all make a mess and then proceed to dig themselves into progressively deeper holes.
Release Date
August 28, 1998
Runtime
106 Minutes
Director
4 'Bottle Rocket' (1996)
Director: Wes Anderson
Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, and James Caan in Bottle Rocket - 1996
Image via Sony Pictures Releasing
While it’s not quite a bottle movie, Bottle Rocket is still fairly small-scale overall, certainly in comparison to the more extravagant films Wes Anderson would go on to direct. This was his first feature film, and is largely solid overall, following three young men who go on a crime spree because they want to impress a senior criminal while making a name for themselves.
Unfortunately for them, the members of this unlikely trio were not at all cut out for a life of crime, resulting in a series of disastrous events that are at first comedic, but then get a little more serious. Wes Anderson has always specialized in combining dry comedy with more heartfelt/dramatic moments, and he does it well here in Bottle Rocket, ensuring the characters – while stupid – are still human and have some positive qualities.
Release Date
February 21, 1996
Runtime
91 Minutes
Director
3 'Pain & Gain' (2013)
Director: Michael Bay
Mark Wahlberg screaming outside in Pain & Gain (2013)
Image via Paramount Pictures
Matching or maybe even surpassing Bad Boys II in crudeness and cynicism, Michael Bay crafted an undeniably mean-spirited film with Pain & Gain, so saying it’s not for everyone would be an understatement. The central characters are largely awful, all conspiring to pull off a kidnapping plot/extortion scheme that spirals out of control, leading to much misery and death.
But Pain & Gain is also a (very dark) comedy, intended to make fun of the villains at the center of the story, even though they were based on real people wrapped up in events that led to actual deaths. It’s not biographical entirely, but it might still feel a little in poor taste for some, even with Pain & Gain definitely going out of its way to make sure you know the main characters are monsters.
Release Date
May 23, 2013
Runtime
129minutes
Director
2 'The Big Lebowski' (1998)
Directors: The Coen Brothers
The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Donny (Steve Buscemi) look mystified at Walter Sobchak as he argues with someone in the bowling alley in 'The Big Lebowski' (1998).
Image via Gramercy Pictures
The Big Lebowski could well be the funniest movie the Coen Brothers have made to date, so much so that it’s honestly much more of a comedy than a crime movie. There are crime elements to the story, sure, but everything gets so muddled up and messy that knowing who’s behind what becomes headache-inducing at a point… or it would, if that wasn’t the whole point of the movie, and if the film itself wasn’t so consistently hilarious.
Coen Brothers regulars like John Goodman and Steve Buscemi shine as not very smart characters, but it's Jeff Bridges’s the Dude who’s perhaps the most clueless of all. His stupidity is uniquely hilarious, and best demonstrated by the way he ends up crashing his car when he fears he’s being tailed. But, as the ending states, the Dude abides, even if he’s not the brightest. You can take comfort in that.
Release Date
March 6, 1998
Runtime
117 minutes
Director
Joel Coen
1 'The Ladykillers' (1955)
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Alec Guinness and some fellow criminals in The Ladykillers (1955)
Image via The Rank Organisation
Most movies starring Peter Sellers are reliably funny, given his strength as a comedic actor (of course, Being There showed he also had the ability to excel at something a bit more serious). On the topic of Sellers, the crime/comedy series The Pink Panther ought to get a shout-out for having a bumbling police inspector often trailing similarly flawed criminals, but The Ladykillers – which Sellers co-starred in – arguably has even more stupidity to go around, as far as the characters are concerned.
It's a movie about a group of criminals utterly failing to execute their heist, all of them bringing about their own deaths thanks to incompetence, stupidity, and a lack of ability to be the titular ladykillers. It’s a total farce of a film, but an exceedingly entertaining and largely timeless one, though it did get a mostly unnecessary (but not irredeemable) remake from the aforementioned Coen Brothers in 2004.
Five oddball criminals planning a bank robbery rent rooms on a cul-de-sac from an octogenarian widow under the pretext that they are classical musicians.