Not because I don't think Jake couldn't play a "bad guy" convincingly and chillingly, but because the kind of film that I sense you're indicating with this polll question is the kind of film I mostly stay well away from. More or less pointless but visuallly stunning violence and cruelty and sadistic behaviour, depicted more and more explicitly and almost ad nauseum even in "big name" films.... *So* not my kind of thing and I don't want it for my favourite actor either. That's one reason why I was very happy with "Zodiac" which took the story development in quite the opposite direction.... focusing at length not on horrible gory slow-motion details but on the suspense and psychological impact on very realistic characters. Yay!
I'm with you in being disgusted about pointless explicit violence and sadistic behavior in films -- particularly if that is the supposed to be the what makes the film "entertaining." Movies like "Hostel" and "Saw" shouldn't even exist, IMO, and if I didn't as a journalist feel obliged to oppose all censorship, those would be the first things I'd censor. I wish the despicable idiots who make them would know enough to censor themselves.
On the other hand, I don't mind violence when it's used in pursuit of some larger artistic or noble goal. Films in that category that come to mind include "Hotel Rwanda" (which was not really all that violent, considering the subject) "The Last King of Scotland," "Schindler's List," etc.
In between are those movies in which violence is used for the purpose of entertainment, but isn't the main point, if that makes sense. I'm thinking of thrillers that revolve around solving a murder or murders. You see the violence -- hopefully not too graphically -- but the entertainment comes largely from the suspense of catching the killer. Some of those are OK.
That said, I think it's possible for there to be a "bad guy" in a film that's not particularly violent. For example, in "Breach" Chris Cooper played an FBI spy with no violence at all. Sometimes bad guys are financial or political bad guys, as in films like "Erin Brockavich" and "All the President's Men."
Could Jake do something like that? Probably, though maybe not as well as Chris Cooper [insert hard-hat wearing ducking smiley here].
