If you feel they're boring / lame, good news. In your campaign you can do anything you want!
Me? I want a starting point. Maybe I stick with that starting point because it fits a role in the fiction, maybe I tweak it to subvert the trope. I can't subvert a trope that doesn't exist.
But you don't
need to subvert a trope if it doesn't exist either!
That was one of the great things about Time of the Dragon. Nobody would have even talked about "subverting tropes" or the like at that time. It wasn't presented as "Our elves are different to your elves!" (which is a lame trope itself), it was presented as - "This is how this culture is, that is what that culture does" and so on. It was incredibly effective and memorable because of it.
Killer whales and chimpanzees are arguably sapient. They kill other whales and chimps. Are they being malevolent?
This is an interesting question with no clear answer.
The first problem is, we don't know if they're sapient.
Second off, we don't know if they understand that other beings are sapient, even each other.
We've got some evidence but we don't know. Chimps do seem like they might be capable of malevolence. But it's not clear. Equally they do appear to be sometimes capable of kindness and helping, but so do some non-sapient-seeming animals.
Orcas are much more questionable than Chimps re: sapience. I'm very skeptical that, even if they are sapient, they understand anything else is. Dolphins might but that's a whole other question.
Also, bear in mind that we're talking D&D malevolence, i.e. evil, which is a specifically human-centric evil. So if something behaves in what would be an evil way for a human to behave in D&D, that would presumably be malevolent.
I think what's complicating matters too is that there are creatures who might be sapient, and dangerous, but not malevolent in a moral sense, just in that they're extremely dangerous to be around. It's legitimate for other creatures to try and defend themselves against those beings, if those beings won't leave them alone.
