Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
Hitchcock explored this in Psycho. We tend to root for the camera's point of view, even when they robbed a small time bank owner who they worked for years with and then getting caught would save them.
We also tend to root for competence over incompetence, in part because the viewer wishes to identify via aspiration, not with someone who appears ridiculous. You can see this in Looney Toons even. We identify with Bugs Bunny over Elmer Fudd because even though Bugs is often an objectively horrible individual, Fudd is absurd.

This carries over into purely aesthetic evaluations, which is why it is not only common, but sometimes practically a necessity to present evil characters as visually horrifying or disgusting in some way. This is particularly important if their evil actions are something that largely happened off-screen or in some previous era that the audience has only heard about but not seen. Horribly evil characters who appear glamorous and stylistic often amass vast sympathy just for that, with vampires being perhaps the most famous case - Bela Lugosi single-handedly shifted their image from monstrous to awesome by virtue of shear personal magnetism.

A good example of both these things in combination is the Ocean's franchise of movies. The character in Ocean's are not good people. They are a variety of thieves and crooks who ultimately steal vast amounts of money (which, because it gets paid in insurance, doesn't come out of the pockets of the bad people they stole from, but instead results in hikes in premiums, meaning that actually literally everyone in the country is their victim). However, the protagonists in these films are some of Hollywood's most appealing stars wedded to casual hyper-competency, so of course the audience sides with them.