Yes, and he’s definitely on the list, but if we’re drawing from Mamet I’m actually going to have to go with MGySgt Robert ‘Bobby’ Scott from the underrated Spartan. Grace: Nice knife.
Scott: Yeah. Got it off an East German fella.
Grace: He give it to ya for a gift?
Scott: No. As I recall, he was… rather reluctant to part with it.Scott: What they gotcha teachin’ here, young sergeant?
Jackie Black: Edged weapons, sir. Knife fighting.
Scott: Don’t you teach 'em knife fighting. Teach 'em to kill. That way, they meet some sonofabitch who studied knife fighting, they send his soul to hell. and Zimmer: I think you broke my arm.
Scott: [slams his arm against the side of a dumpster] Now it’s broken.
Mamet managed to carry some of the same gravatis over to The Unit with Jonas ‘Snake Doctor’ Blaine (“Now, Rangers, did you sign up to get out of the house, or do you want to come with me and kick the door down?”) but lacking the profanity it doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Outside of that, I’m going to look to Lee Marvin (Point Blank, The Professionals, Prime Cut), Robert DeNiro (Heat, Cape Fear, Goodfellas), and Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, Appaloosa). Wayne, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger are all charactures of badasses, rather than portraying genuine bassassedry itself.
Archibald Cunningham, as played by Tim Roth in Rob Roy. He’s just so evil. I couldn’t watch Tim Roth for a long time afterwards, simply because I hated him so much in Rob Roy. And I love Tim Roth. Great character, excellently acted.
In the Scorsese universe you have to mention Paul Sorvino’s character from Goodfellas. He doesn’t have to say a word. He just steps outside, shoots a menacing glare and everyone goes quiet.
Would mention Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull, but he’s more of a raging asshole than a genuine badass. Not that I would want to get into a fight with him, mind you.
Lee Marvin in anything (“The Big Red One” for example)
Charles Bronson, similar.
The heavy in “The Long Goodbye” (Altman dir., starring Elliot Gould) – similar to Marvin’s character in … that flick with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame by Fritz Lang. Smashes the coke bottle in his girlfriend’s face, says something like “I love this girl…you, I don’t even like, imagine what I’ll do to you?” and, later, “take your pants off…cut him.”
All these are fine until such time that a film is made of Snow Crash, and then Raven will take top billing.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.
