Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) & Vincent Vega (John Travolta), PULP FICTION (1994)
For all the talk about the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking, his resurrection and reanimation of ‘70s pop culture, and the way he redefined the crime drama for a postmodern generation, there’s a profound misunderstanding of why his two most famous creations – the black-suited hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega – are so enjoyable to watch. It’s not the hip pseudo-philosophical dialogue; it’s not the bad-ass speechifying; it’s not even the rapport between Samuel L. Jackson and born-again-hard John Travolta that makes Jules & Vincent so downright charming. No, what really makes them work is that Tarantino manages to do what no one else had ever done: he transformed the story of two murderous assassins into an engaging workplace comedy. When you get right down to it, Jules & Vincent are just two working stiffs whose job happens to be a tad idiosyncratic. When they’re not filling some rip-off artist full of hot lead, they’re just like any two likeable jerks at the office or factory of your choice: they swap vacation stories, they get annoyed at each other’s long-established social tics, they blame each other for workplace fuckups, they laugh at each others’ jokes, they eat junk food together at break time, and they drive around aimlessly between jobs trying to think of something to do, whether it’s fall in love with the wrong girl or have a profound religious awakening. For all the goofy trappings, from the automatic weapons to the mysteriously glowing box to the wallet that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER, we relate so strongly to Jules & Vincent because, despite their bloody way of making a living, we recognize in them the comfortable familiarity of workplace ritual. If anyone tells me that their scenes with Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolfe are anything but extremely well-done sitcom detritus, we'll call them a liar to their face.
Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) & Pluto (Michael Beach), ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)
One of the scariest of the many scary moments in Carl Franklin's modern backwoods noir (which Thornton co-wrote) comes when the intelligent and more calculating member of the duo, Pluto, instructs the more volatile Ray not to flip out when they're stopped by a highway cop: "We don't want to kill him if we don't have to." Ray takes Pluto's advice on this one because he understands that Pluto is smarter than he is; it's not as if the idea that there might be reasons not to simply kill someone who poses an inconvenience to him is something he understands on any deeper emotional level. Both men are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep them free and on the move, and to pick up a little scratch on the side as they go, and both are useful to the other, though it's Pluto's genius for sizing up a situation and deciding that it's time to wipe somebody out that keeps them free and on the move for as long as they are. The fact that they're a biracial team adds sauce to the mix, even as the redneck live wire (with the black girlfriend from the South) and his cucumber-cool partner resist the urge to ever acknowledge it.
Sappensly (Robert Webber) & Quill (Gig Young), BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
If Fante and Mingo had lived to middle age, smartened up their wardrobes, and gone freelance, they might have ended up like these guys. Alfredo Garcia, a bizarre modern Western with white men in suits, equipped with planes, cars, and machine guns, tearing around Mexico in search of a guy's rotting melon that has a million dollar bounty on it, is the director Sam Peckinpah's scurviest film, a response to Hollywood's refusal to let him make the kind of movies he wanted to make, and Sappensly and Quill are probably meant as his fuck-you note to the studio executives he regarded as no better than manicured hyenas, gutless wonders, amoral killers. Peckinpah always had conflicted feelings about his characters and everything else he put on screen, and there's an unexpected, and unexpectedly affecting moment, when Quill is killed; Sappinsly looks at his body, utters his name in a voice cracking with grief, and then turns his gun on the movie's hero (Warren Oates) in what may be a desperate need to lash out at a world in which he's suddenly found himself alone or what may be a gunman's (successful) bid for suicide, forcing Oates to put him out of his misery. It's the closest thing to a moment of warm feeling in the movie.
Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) & Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)
Neither of these guys looks like much of a threat; in fact one of them looks like the love child of David Crosby and Gallagher. (Putter Smith, who made his film debut as Mr. Kidd, made only a couple of other films and is actually best known as a jazz bassist. Bruce Glover played one of Jack Nicholson's "associates" in Chinatown but may now be best known as Crispin Glover's father.) Yet they manage to achieve memorability just on the basis of their archness, and for serving as the James Bond series' concession to the value of teamwork. Oddjob or Jaws would probably beat the shit out of either of them if one tried to sit at next to him in the villains' commissary, but so long as they stick together, respect must be paid: you never know what one of them might be up to behind your back while you're throttling the other. As for the homoerotic element alluded to elsewhere in this feature, it's there for sure, but it's best to not dwell on it, and not just because nobody wants to picture these guys kissing. (And make no mistake about it, we don't just mean that nobody wants to picture them kissing each other.) For all its charms, the Bond series has seldom been out front in terms of images of social progress, and the close-up of Mr. Wint appearing to leer pleasurably as Sean Connery literally shoves a bomb up his ass is not 007's proudest moment.
Eric (Eric Deulen) & Alex (Alex Frost), ELEPHANT (2003)
Standing in marked contrast to most of the murderous duos on this list are the teenage killers in Gus Van Sant’s impenetrable, elegiac evocation of the Columbine massacre, Elephant. Though one of them shares a name with the real-life Colorado school shooters, it’s not by design; like most of the characters in the film, actor Eric Deulen lends his name to his creation. Alex (played by the revoltingly compelling Alex Frost) is the dominant member of the twosome, plotting the massacre during class and delivering its terrifying final lines, but unlike most big-screen killer combos, there’s nothing flashy, clever or even wickedly likable about Eric & Alex. Though their actions are, in the end, far more costly in human lives than other big-screen killers, they are meant to be neither nightmarish horror-film bad-asses or appealing anti-heroes. In keeping with the tone of this wonderful, frightening film, they are ciphers: we know little more about them when the movie ends than we did when it began, and it’s easy to see that Van Sant made the movie not to explicate Columbine, but to mock our pretense that Columbine was explicable. A number of viewers detected an element of homophobia in the scene where the two kiss in a shared shower, but Van Sant no more suggests that repressed homosexuality is to blame for the boys’ rampage than video games, social isolation, or any one of a dozen red herrings he throws out. We greedily devour every one, so hungry are we for some hint, any hint that such a horrid, pointless waste of human life must have an explanation, any explanation. But in the end, we are left only with a lot of bodies and a pair of enigmas. That’s murder for you.
— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce
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