Ten Movie Tough Guys And The Dogs They Love
Because even the most hardened of killers needs a best friend.
Joe (Nicolas Cage) in Joe (2013)
Look, I promise this article isn’t going to consist only of movies named after the protagonist. But in David Gordon Green’s excellent Southern crime drama about an ex-con who becomes an unexpected mentor to a boy (Tye Sheridan) with a no-good drunk father, we know Joe is a good guy because he loves his brown-and-white American bulldog Faith (“looks like a cow”) and searches for her when she goes missing. Joe keeps her tethered under his house, symbolising his precarious hold on his own violent tendencies. And when he sics Faith on a mean alsatian in his favourite brothel (“That dog is an asshole!”), her savagery is Joe’s own sublimated desire to kill.