One of my favourite cinematic characters would have to be one I like to call the pissed off sociopath. It’s usually a guy, and he’s the kind of guy that’s a loner, an outsider. He’s often typically amoral and morally ambiguous, and may even operate on the wrong side of the law. However, he always has a strong personal code of honour, which he struggles to uphold in the face of overwhelming odds. The journey he undertakes is always one of redemption, and this character always has to face up to a moral dilemma, a choice, which inevitably ends in violence. The violence is something he is trying to avoid, to get past, to put behind him, but his antagonists always force his hand and back him into a corner, until he has to react.

The Western genre in particular is filled with these characters. Think Clint Eastwood, in The Unforgiven and Gran Torino (a western set in suburbia) and years before that in Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter.

Harvey Keitel also played this role well. In Bad Lieutenant and also in the Piano, where as George Baines to Holly Hunter’s Ada McGrath, he is both tender and at the same time somehow dangerously psychotic. To the extent that we don’t know whether he’s going to fuck her or beat the shit out of her – possibly both. Apologies if that comes across as horribly violent and sexist. I mean it tongue in cheek. Don’t mess with the K man is all I’m saying.

Dennis Hopper also played this role quite well, as Did Bobby De Niro, although both of them tended to stray across from sociopath into full on psychopath territory.  Think Hopper in Blue Velvet and De Niro in Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, or more fittingly, in The Deer Hunter.

Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have also had a crack at this role on occasion. Hackman in Mississippi Burning, Nicholson in The Pledge.

A classic character in this genre is Guy Pearce’s portrayal of the reluctant outlaw Charlie Burns in The Proposition, a man caught between love of family and his inner drive to find redemption, in this case through killing his own psychopathic brother, Arthur. Although it’s an Australian film, it is still a classic western story. Even the scenarios are the same. Law and order trying to impose its will on the untamed wilderness.

For me perhaps the best proponent of the pissed off sociopath character doing the rounds today is Woody Harrelson. Woody’s got the role down pat, so much so that he can convey it with a single look. It doesn’t matter which character he is portraying, you know you’ve stepped over the line with Woody when he gives you that look. He even does it to comic effect in Zombieland, portraying a man in a desperate and often bloody search for Twinkies.

He does it in No Country for Old Men, where unfortunately for Woody, psychopath trumps sociopath.

He does it in the first series of True Detective as the conflicted compulsively womanising detective, Marty Hart.

In fact he does it in damn near every film he’s ever been in. He’ll probably keep doing it. Woody is the Hollywood version of Stone Cold Steve Austin.