The Online Film Critics Society recently published its list of the Top 100 Villains of All Time. At the very top of the Top 100 was Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones), from George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy, followed by Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, then Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) from Hitchcock’s Psycho -- all worthy villains, and hard to displace from the very top of the list. However, joining them on my own Top 10 list of memorable villains will now be Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the thoroughly evil hit man from the Coen brothers’ latest film, No Country for Old Men.

Based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel and directed and scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men tells the story of three men caught up in a drug deal gone awry in Texas in 1980, near the Mexican border. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran, is out hunting antelope when he stumbles across a drug deal that has gone badly: all but one participant is dead. Moss finds $2 million in cash, takes it, and leaves behind a badly injured Mexican begging for water. After several hours, guilt gets the better of him, and he returns to aid the dying Mexican. This time, Moss himself is ambushed; he abandons his truck and barely escapes with his life. Realizing that he will now be tracked down for the money, Moss sends his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), to stay with her mother while he deals with his pursuers: an assorted bunch of drug dealers and killers, including psychopathic hit man Anton Chigurh and honest sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who is trying to protect Moss and his wife.

Jones was a good choice to portray Bell, a veteran with a family history of law enforcement: his daddy was a sheriff, his daddy’s daddy was a sheriff, etc. With his slow talking style and a face etched with experience, Jones does a good job of capturing the worry and fear Bell experiences when confronted with a type of violence he’s never seen before. Bell no longer seems to understand the world he inhabits.

Llewelyn Moss is a breakout role for Josh Brolin, who has portrayed many unsavory characters in many supporting roles. Here he gets to play a good guy who carries much of the film. Moss seems better equipped to deal with the bad guys than Bell, perhaps because he’s younger, but also possibly because he’s not quite as good a man.

Spanish actor Javier Bardem must have relished portraying psychopath Anton Chigurh. A cold-blooded killer you simultaneously admire and despise, Chigurh wantonly murders without regret, destroying many innocent lives. Yet he has an extremely dark sense of humor, a strange personal philosophy, and a unique way of being. He appears out of nowhere, seemingly all-knowing, carrying a silenced shotgun and something else: a compressed-air tank with a metal nozzle that drives a retractable post into the victim’s brain, similar to how cattle are killed in an abattoir. Although Chigurh speaks, he by no means fits the Hollywood cliché of the "talking killer" whose downfall is caused by his need to explain everything. Chigurh dispatches his victims quickly, with a minimum of gab.

Most of the characters in No Country for Old Men seem to feel that because they are tough, they are in control. But no one here is in control; everyone is sideswiped by something unexpected, even the seemingly omniscient Chigurh.

After watching No Country for Old Men, I was reminded of a line from another great western, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. After gunslinger William Munny (Eastwood) kills a man, his young vigilante partner says, "I guess he had it coming." Munny solemnly replies, "We all got it coming, kid." I suspect that Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers would agree.

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