We Need to Talk: Stupid Bad Guy Cliche
I was watching Wonder Woman the other day with my brother when we both simultaneously groaned when the German villain, General Erich Ludendorff — within moments of his character introduction — spins around and shoots one of his subordinates for failing to make his workers work fast enough.
A similar scene was featured in 2015’s Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation where the British bad guy, Solomon Lane, kills one of his henchman after being showed up by Rebecca Ferguson’s character, Ilsa Faust.
This cliche has been repeated in films, television shows and books for years. And it needs to stop.
The idea is that showing a bad guy shoot a henchman displays how heartless and scary they are, but in reality it does quite the opposite.
We’re no longer afraid of the bad guy that shoots another bad guy. There’s nothing scary about that.
Much like when the bad guy says these cliched words, “We have work to do,” the ‘shooting of a henchman’ scene is so typical and overused that it’s worse than bad, it’s boring.
You would think that screenwriters would constantly be on the lookout for overused cliches such as this, but surprisingly these horrible character moments still somehow find themselves being inserted into big budget Hollywood productions.
In order to pull of a good bad guy, you have to be a bit more creative.
A perfect example of this is the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. The Joker’s introduction in this film is a cinematic masterpiece.
While robbing a gangster-run bank, the Joker’s henchmen begin taking each other out during the course of the heist at the orders of the Joker, only for the Joker to finish them off in the end, leaving himself the sole survivor.
This scene is effective because it shows that the Joker isn’t only willing to kill a single subordinate, he’s willing to kill anyone who isn’t useful. Even the most stalwart bad guys aren’t willing to take out their entire crews in most movies.
That’s not to say that this is the only way to create a good bad guy, but it shows that with a little creativity, you can get over the cliche and create something a little more memorable and effective.
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