A Hundred Henchmen?

Some of you are thinking that could never happen, so why do I even ask? But 2024's hit film from India, Kill (Directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, written by Bhat and Ayesha Syed) has our hero fighting over forty gang members. The story is kind of "John Wick on a Speeding Train" (being remade by the John Wick team). India has one of the biggest film industries in the world, and with films like RRR (an action war movie...with big musical numbers!) they are making inroads on the American audience. Kill has no singing or dancing, it’s 105 minutes of nonstop action and shocking violence.

Our Commando hero Amrit (Lakshya) and his commando best friend Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) have a few days of leave and plan to get drunk and let off some steam...

Then he gets a call from his girlfriend Tulika (the beautiful Tanya Maniktala). Her wealthy father has a wealthy pal with a single son her age, and they have put together a merger...The family is taking the express train so Tulika and this rich kid can get married. She doesn’t want to marry him, but her father insists.

So our hero and his best friend hop the train so that he can propose to his girlfriend and they can break it to her dad that the merger is not going to happen. She’s already taken. Nice story if it ends there...

But a gang of 40 thieves armed with chains and knives and sledgehammers, and their smug young leader Fani (Raghav Juyal)) hop the train to rob everyone...And discover the wealthy father and his daughter. He can kidnap the daughter and have the father wire the money to their bank account before the train reaches its destination. Plus the family will make great hostages if the police show up.

So our Commando hero and his best friend now have to fight 41 armed bad guys with their bare hands (and anything that they can find on the speeding train) to rescue the woman he loves and her family as the train speeds across India. Lots of violence ensues. No, more than you are thinking. No, maybe three times what you are thinking now.

If you think having 41 thieves just stealing passengers' wallets and jewelry is a preposterous idea? I mean, how much is that per thief? Originally I thought the reason for 40 Thieves was probably to give our hero a lot of people to kill (and Ali Baba). But it didn't make sense to have that many bad guys if they were just stealing wallets. But my friend Calix pointed out that this was based on a true story. There really were 40 thieves who robbed a train and a couple of commandos who killed them all.

But the problem is that 40 thieves are 40 characters plus the smarmy main villain. Though some of those 40 are played by distinctive-looking actors (stand out is a guy who looks 7 feet tall and works out a lot), most of these guys have no character. In my Action book, I have a chapter called "Weapons For Weirdos" which is about giving each of your bad guys a different weapon that matches their personalities...but that’s for characters like Odd Job (and his razor-edged hat) in Goldfinger. The main henchman. What if you have 40 henchmen? Or a hundred?

The problem with these 40 Thieves is that if you phone up Central Casting and say you need 40 or 100 mean-looking guys, you get a bunch of henchmen who all look similar. If these guys are going to do their own fighting, so you ask for 40 or 100 stuntmen, once again you end up with a bunch of similar-looking guys. It would be great if casting found 40 or 100 guys who all looked completely different than each other...but that’s close to impossible. I know a bunch of stuntmen, and they tend to look similar to each other. This means that it’s our job as writers to figure out what makes them different.

So let’s start with their weapons. We need 41 different types of close-quarters fighting weapons. That sounds impossible! When I did a couple of minutes of research, I found 31 different types of Indian close-quarters fighting weapons. So that's a start! There are a lot of different types of daggers and knives on the list, but also a bunch of cool weapons that weren't in the film - bladed brass knuckles! Different types of whips! Throwing knives! Weird hammers with knife blades. And many types of sticks with either pointy or weighted ends. Plus a whip with short metal tubes that can turn it into a spear. One of the things about research is that it can open doors that you didn't know existed.

Though 31 different weapons aren’t 40 or 100, we can create slightly different variations on each of those 31 weapons and get it up to 100. If handle colors are different, that’s a start. But now think about how well-maintained the weapon is: Rusty? Dirty? Damaged? Perfectly clean? Brand new and hasn’t tasted blood yet? What else can you come up with that distinguishes this weapon from those 31 types?

And that’s a clue to character.

Different types of weapons also mean different types of fights. That adds variety to the action scenes (Kill could have used some of that). It’s good to show how each uses their weapon before the fight - so that the audience can go "Oh no!" when the hero has to fight them. That’s easy to do when you have henchmen robbing people on a train, or doing something else villainous in your story. We can see them in action before they fight our hero.

It’s also a good idea to give each character a signature move, too. How do they use the weapon? Do they have some sort of "trick" they do when practicing with the weapon? Making the knife "dance" over their knuckles when they change its position from blade up to blade down? Can they flip that spear like a baton? Can they spin the pistol on their finger? If you think of all of the "gun tricks" in Western films, those end up being "character signatures" - the way The Rifleman on TV cocked his lever action rifle by spinning it in his hand.

Even in hand-to-hand fighting, there are going to be individual techniques that characters use that sets them apart from the others. Both Famke Janssen’s assassin in Goldeneye and Rebecca Ferguson’s MI6 Agent in the Mission Impossible movies spin onto the shoulders of the man they are fighting and crush his neck between their thighs. Sexy and deadly. I realize that we are writers, not fight choreographers, but this is the fun part of writing. What cool move can we come up with that makes this character’s fighting style unique? There are plenty of fight videos online...and think about how every TV wrestler has that one move they are famous for. You want things like this for each of those 40 or 100 Henchmen.

Though this might sound like a lot of work, it’s fun!

Now we’ve taken those 31 different types of close-quarters fighting weapons from India, added something specific about this one of the 31 weapons, added how this weapon is cared for (which tells us something about the character), given the character an individual "move" or technique with the weapon...but what about how they dress?

Though we’re talking about an action movie, all of these techniques can be used if instead of 40 Thieves you have 40 Business Executives or 40 Students or 40 Musicians or 40 to 100 of any kind of "sub-supporting characters". If they are more than just a face in the crowd, and they need to be part of the story? We need to be able to tell them apart. What are the "weapons" of a Business Executive? Their phone and suit and neckties? How about those Musicians? What makes each of the Tubas different than the others? How do they play the instrument in a unique way? You can apply this to any genre or situation!

Your Assignment: 40 different phones that tell us something about the character. Brands, cases, styles, colors, how they take calls, how they answer the phone.

In Walter Hill’s great flick The Warriors (1979) the titular street gang are on an odyssey to get back to their Coney Island home turf, with every other street gang in New York City trying to kill them. One of the many things that makes this film great is the way that each gang has a different look and weapon and different costumes. 

This is way beyond "gang colors" - there are 21 gangs, and each looks completely different: The Baseball Furies wear white pinstripe baseball uniforms and are armed with bats, The Turnbull ACs have shaved heads and wear denim and drive around in a school bus, the Rogues wear black leather vests and caps, The Lizzies are an all-girl gang and wear tie-dyed T-shirts under their blouses, The Punks wear denim overalls over striped rugby shirts and roller skate everywhere, The Hi-Hats wear top hats and red T-shirts and have suspenders holding up their trousers, the Boppers wear tan trousers and bright purple silk waistcoats over black shirts and wear snap-brim hats (each with a different colored band)... 

Each of the gangs has a look that not only differentiates it from the other gangs (and gives us some visual variety) but tells us something about who they are. These are character-based costumes. Whether it’s gangs or a criminal organization or businessmen at a company, think about how similar costumes can tell us about the characters and group them together.

One of the problems with John Woo’s Silent Night (2023) was that, as our hero fights his way up the gang’s hierarchy from guys pushing drugs on the street to "middle management" to the gang "lieutenants" to "Mr Big" who runs the gang...they all looked exactly the same. It was difficult to see our hero climbing the ladder of bad guys to the top because there was nothing to differentiate the people at each "rung of the ladder". 

Hey, this is where you need Warriors Theory! What does each level of your criminal gang dress like? The guys selling drugs on the street probably don’t dress or act the same as the guy at the top. That doesn’t mean the #1 guy needs to be in a suit, it’s more fun to add character! If you had millions of dollars and wanted to show off, what would you wear? How would you show people that you were crazy rich or crazy powerful or both?

Whether it’s a criminal organization or an office building where we step off the elevator at every floor and look at the employees...how do their clothes and props tell us what level of importance they are? Think of how we show whether this is a low-level salesman or a department head or a junior executive or the CEO only through their wardrobe?

Your Assignment: You have ten floors of an office building - come up with ten different wardrobes that show us what floor we are on.

If you have 40 or 100 Thieves or Cops in a squad room or Doctors in a hospital or any other situation where you have the urge to use a number in a character slug. THIEF #4 and THIEF #5 look exactly alike on the page. They may not be important characters, but why not give them a little character? MUSTACHED THIEF and BALD THIEF give us a quick picture of the character - but that also limits casting...Harrison Ford wouldn’t even grow a mustache to play General Ross in Captain America: Brave New World. Plus, it’s just an external, not really character-related. 

So instead of a number or a physical trait, I prefer to use a character trait like HIPSTER THIEF or FUSSY THIEF or PARANOID THIEF which gives them some character and helps us tell them apart on a crowded Train. 

We aren't talking about deep characterization, here, we're just talking surface that some bit part actor can play. We can give the exact same line of dialogue to HIPSTER THIEF and FUSSY THIEF and PARANOID THIEF and get three different line readings. We're likely to project a personality onto FUSSY THIEF that we wouldn't project onto the antiseptic THIEF #5. Always try to use an adjective instead of a number! We don't want any of our characters to feel like a number when they are supposed to be three-dimensional human beings.

Their weapon symbolizes the character - and in addition to that signature move, you want a couple of character things that make this guy very different than the other 39 guys. What are those things? I have an article on distinctive dialogue and I think that the same thing applies here. What is the physical "instant identifier" for each character and how does that show his character? 

OK, now give each a different attitude. We have 40 Thieves, but that's just their job, Snow White lived with 7 dwarves, and each had a different attitude (their name!). Hey, you are 1/6 of the way there! OK, how do their clothes show their attitude? Their dialogue? Make each of these bad guys different, with a different kind of fight.

Your Assignment: Forty Thieves? Forty Adjectives to give them character! Tip: Don’t focus on the Crime aspect of character, whatever adjective you use can work for Businessmen or Doctors or Students or Musicians or Police Officers. We already know they are Thieves, we want additional information.

Whether you have 40 Thieves on an express train robbing the passengers like in Kill or a teacher with 40 students or a new promotion in an office with 40 Executives, part of our job as writers is to make sure that the reader and the audience doesn’t confuse one for the other. That means we need to make even those "spear carrier" roles distinctive and interesting. 

Hey, it’s camouflage flip phone guy!