“Thug life born, thug life bred, and when I die, I’ll be thug life dead. ”
Those touching words were said by somebody at some point in time. Perhaps it was a wrestler who said them, or maybe it was in a movie. Perhaps I have the wrong homophone and it was merely a commercial for delicious thug life brand bread. I prefer thug life cinnamon raisin, but my wife likes neither the bread’s allegorical relationship to the criminal lifestyle nor what she refers to as “grape corpses.”
These things being what they may, evoke a strong sense of the quiet dignity of movie thugs. Be they henchmen, goons, street toughs or faceless guys punched by the Batman, the life of the movie thug is not a glamorous one. It doesn’t matter if you are a stout Asian with a deadly hat, a nigh-invincible Aryan hell-bent on killing John McClane of the NYPD, or just some dude bouncing bullets of off Superman’s cornea, we here at CPO understand your plight. We don’t care if you’ve got a machinegun for a leg, unbreakable teeth, or any sort of questionably useful super-power. We’re here for you even if all you have is two meaty fists and orders from Ben Gazzara to wreck the Double Deuce. Or maybe it was evil automobile mogul Craig T. Nelson who gave you your naughty to-do list.
Or maybe a hammy John Lithgow.
Any road, it’s hard out there for henchmen.
You won’t get many good lines. Sometimes you won’t get any lines.
You won’t get an action figure, and if you do, it’ll suck.
You can forget about killing Sylvestor Stallone. You might be able to get an impotent bullet through Bruce Willis’s biceps, but that’s just going to seal your fate. Offing Schwarzenegger? That’s right out the window.
Frankly, it’s hard to stay alive. If you threaten the hostages or be a total badass, the hero has got to kill you. If you are pro-active enough to kill the hero’s mentor, you will face certain death.
It would seem like a good idea to mitigate your evil. The hero has no justification to kill you if you’re the diet coke of evil.
BUT if you are a nice thug, your survival rate doesn’t necessarily improve. The villain might kill you on a whim or to set an example. Even worse, you might get beaten up by the plucky comic relief! This is truly a fate worse than death for those brave henchmen and henchwomen out there.
But in the end, isn’t it all worth it? I mean, we’re all in this for the intrinsic value of crime, right? Without hired goons, who would kidnap the action hero’s daughter?
Huh?
Who would kill his partner?
Who would provide that facile wall of separation between the hero and the villain?
Do you really want to live in a celluloid world where the rogue cop gets to keep his badge and his gun? I sure don’t. It’s you thugs out there that make these things possible. It’s you guys and your random acts of violence and malevolence that make the shift commander ride the hero so hard.
It’s you guys that force the hero to play by his own rules in a world he didn’t make!
We here at CPO salute you movie thugs, and those character actors who portray you. We salute the Tracey Walters of the world, the Billy Dragos, the Dennis Haydens, the Al Leongs, the Danny Trejos, the M.C. Gaineys, the Nathan Jungs, and the Michael Papajohns.
Kudos.
