(6) - Are You Badass?

Hello all. Welcome to a special blog post. I'll get right down to the dirty.

My cousin recently asked me who I thought the most badass movie character of all-time was. After some thought, I told him I couldn't really narrow it down to one, but a few came to mind. Jason Bourne, Achilles, Jules Winnfield, etc etc. You get the point. He then challenged me to a duel, sort of.

We would each come up with a list of 65 Badass movie characters, and then narrow the 130 names down to 65. Obviously there was a lot of overlap, but in the end we've managed to shorten the list to 65. The next part was the toughest, and that was to create the draw, a la NCAA March Madness. I was the one who created the draw and I kept two things in mind: 1) Matchups I would love to see, and 2) Like qualities in characters.

For example, in one bracket I have Albus Dumbledore, Lord Voldemort and Merlin, because they're all wizards and I would love to see the duels between them. In another bracket I have Jason Bourne, Bryan Mills, River Tam, Pai Mei, Neo and Morpheus, because they're all badass fighters and a fight between any of them would be very exciting to watch. Some great first round matchups: Dirty Harry vs. Travis Bickle, The Terminator vs. Conan the Barbarian, William Cutting vs. Emperor Palpatine.

We've been going at this in our spare time for about two weeks now, and we're up to the point where we've each filled out the bracket, and now will compare and come up with a FINAL bracket. When we get our answers I will be sure to post them.

We tried very hard to omit superheroes or supervillains because that just brings on a whole new debate. We kept The Joker in (Ledger's version), and he comes in highly ranked, but that was our only slide. And we've also omitted very recent movies (Inglorious Basterds, District 9, etc).

I'll blog the brackets when all is said and done and we have a champion.

BADASS.