When the Bad Guys Have Their Own Bad Guys

Last week I posted on villains. It received a lot of response.  These bad guys are an important part of the story.

This was impressed upon me the night before last as I was folding a mountain of clothes in the bedroom I share with Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com. On cable television they were playing the movie Heat with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, and a number of other actors giving fine performances.

Robert De Niro, a bad guy, is the first character you meet. He heads up a crew of professional criminals who specialize in big heists. They don’t get out of bed for anything less than a million dollars. Al Pacino is a homicide/robbery lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department whose job it is to take down guys like De Niro.

The viewer quickly becomes enamored with the crew of bad guys. In a twisted way, they are likable crooks, even though they are hard-core and you would be hard-pressed to hang around with them. A few of them have families. One of them has a wife who has invested his ill-gotten gains wisely. Another, who looks like a hardened gang member, refers to his wife as, “my Anna.”

They are also loyal to one another. They are professionals. They try not to kill, but when they have to in order to insure their survival, they do not hesitate. Everything is carefully planned. As Robert De Niro’s character says, “Do you see me doing thrill seeker liquor store hold-ups with a ‘Born to Lose’ tattoo on my chest?”  

There are different levels of bad guys in the story, though. It seems the villains also have villains. They take on a freelancer crook early on in the movie, an evil fellow named Waingro, who later becomes their foil. In the process Waingro becomes the villain everyone loves to hate, along with Van Sant, a money launderer who is upset because he was a victim of Robert De Niro’s crew (the classic crook who was upset because he got ripped off by other crooks).

Even Al Pacino’s character is taken in by the bad guys. In one of the best scenes in the movie Pacino’s police lieutenant character and De Niro’s professional criminal character sit down over a cup of coffee and a riveting exchange. By the end of it they profess their mutual admiration, but each of them also warns the one that they will not hesitate to kill the other if it comes down to it.

So now you have rich layers of villains, and at least one of the good guys even admiring some of the bad guys.

Great villains make great stories. Find a copy of Heat and set aside and few hours to watch it.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

Comments

[SA_Merk]

This is great advice.
Do you remember a movie called the Italian Job? Another great example of villians of villians, I think.
It is helpful to remind writers that even antagonists have good and bad days as they face good and bad guys/gals. It's the difference between the depth markers of great stories.
The deeper we go, the better the story being told.