Michael Caine's Jack Carter - hero, villain or anti-hero in this movie?

Yeah, Get Carter is a bleak movie which I think does a great job of making gangsterism look ugly.

I heard Caine did the film as a response to The Italian Job, which makes gangland schemes look like cheeky, sexy fun.

In this film, the main character is definitely a villain, through and through. He's ruthless, and dosen't care about anybody but himself, and dosen't care how much damage he causes while he goes scorched earth on whomever he finds out was involved with his brother's murder. So what happened to him at the end was pretty inevitable, given who he was, and what he did for a loving.

Exactly.

As Carter himself says to a woman, about his brother, "I was always the villain in this family."

We are rooting for Carter to get everybody he needs to for revenge -- zeroing in ultimately on Eric after Brumby and Albert(who seems a poor, innocent soul right before Carter viciously kills him by knife after implying he would let him survive if he gave up information but hey -- Albert WAS in that porn film with Carter's niece.)

But in his villainy -- along the way we watch him semi-drown and manhandle one woman (who dies in the car trunk he put her in when the car is pushed by others into the reiver) and force another woman to strip before pinning her down and injecting her with a lethal overdose.

In those actions, Carter abandons being an "anti-hero"(which allows for SOME decency and heroics) and becomes very muc a villain who we watch in full knowledge that he is an evil man at heart, a ruthless killer and probably a psychopath.

Interesting: Get Carter came out in 1971. Also in 1971, Alfred Hitchcock offered Michael Caine the lead in his proposed movie "Frenzy." Hitchcock was offering Caine a "psycho role" ala Anthony Perkins in Psycho, but this one was R-rated: a modern-day London-based psychopath who rapes women and then strangles them to death with a necktie. Caine wrote in one of his autobiographies "I didn't want to be associated with that part." Fair enough, but in Get Carter we see glimpses of how Caine would have played the "Frenzy" psycho in how he mandhandles and kills women. I suppose the difference in Frenzy is that the female victims are innocent and arbitrary. The women Caine kills in Get Carter are complicit and tied to the mob.

Some years after turning down ?Frenzy" -- when when his career was ridding with flops -- Caine would take a coupla of psycho ladykiller parts....