User blog:Sirin of the Void/PE Proposal - Jatemme Manning


 * Original: [//villains.fandom.com/f/p/3179493162221867647 https://villains.fandom.com/f/p/3179493162221867647]

Jatemme Manning appears in the film Widows.

What's the work?
A brief intro to the story. The plot kicks off when professional thief, Harry Rawlings, and his crew steal $2 million from Jamal Manning, a crime boss who’s running for the position of his ward’s alderman. During Harry’s getaway, his crew gets in a shootout with the cops which ends with their van exploding and the money getting torched. Jamal, wanting his money back, threatens Harry’s widow, Veronica Rawlings, to pay him back or else. Having no other way to pay Jamal back, Veronica plans on using Harry’s notebook to carry out his next planned heist. In order to accomplish it, she recruits the widows of Harry’s old crew to help her under threat of ratting them out to Jamal as well.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s the candidate…

Who is Jatemme Manning?
Jatemme Manning is the right-hand man/enforcer for his older brother, Jamal. Jamal wants to make the jump to politics explicitly for the kickbacks, and because it’s safer than a life of crime. Jatemme, on the other hand, really doesn’t have any higher aspirations and seems to prefer his current position. Actually, he seems pretty bored with anything that doesn’t have to do with violence, killing or casual cruelty, which he always commits with a laidback demeanor.

His true colors comes when he meets with two of his men who failed to protect the money Harry stole. When one of his men tells him he found the pair rapping, Jatemme orders the two to perform their rap for him. At first Jatemme stares down the one rapping, intimidating him, then he starts bobbing his head along and acts like he’s enjoying the song. Then he shoots the rapper in the head, turns to the one who was beatboxing and says, “Run.” The beatboxer runs but only gets a few steps before Jatemme shoots him too. Then he tells his men to clean the mess up.

Jatemme’s next act of cruelty comes when he visits Bobby Welsh, a bar owner confined to a wheelchair who was a criminal contact of Harry’s. Veronica had earlier met with Welsh and questioned him about Harry’s notebook, so Jatemme comes in to find out what she came in for. When Welsh refuses to answer, Jatemme stabs Welsh in the shoulder, avoids Welsh’s attempts to fight him off with a telescopic baton, and knocks him out of his wheelchair. Then Jatemme starts stabbing Welsh a few times up his leg and on his shoulder again to find out where he can feel pain and where he can’t as he tortures him. Welsh finally tells him about the notebook and Jatemme says that Jamal’s ordered him not to kill him, but says if he finds out Welsh was lying to him, an unfortunate act of God will happen to him. Then, to cap it off, he picks up his wheelchair and throws it a good distance away from him.

Next, Jatemme visits Bash O’Reilly, Veronica’s chauffeur who she plans on using as her crew’s getaway driver. Bash is nice guy but described as “simple”, and it's implied he has some kind of disorder. Jatemme says he wants Bash to help him get Harry’s notebook, but when Bash points out he doesn’t have it, Jatemme has his men beat him to death while Jatemme sits and watches the football game playing in Bash’s apartment, turning up the volume to drown out his screams. The next day he sends Veronica the Super Bowl Ring that Harry had bought for Bash and calls her, threatening her to get the brothers their money.

Jatemme spends the remainder of the movie mostly in the background, watching Veronica and her crew as they prepare for their heist. The plan is to steal $5 million from Jack Mulligan, the corrupt son of the incumbent alderman who’s running in the race to replace his (even more corrupt) father. After Veronica and her crew load the money into their van, Jatemme gets the drop on them, forces them to abandon their money at gunpoint, then steals the van and their haul, leaving them for the cops.

His success is short-lived though, as the widows chase Jatemme down in a car and rear-end him, causing him to crash and die. It’s unfortunately as anticlimactic as it sounds.

Is he heinous by the standards of the story?
For a low-key crime thriller, I think Jatemme passes the heinous standard. Even when he’s acting on his brother’s orders, Jatemme takes sadistic delight in hurting and killing people, usually prolonging their suffering just for his own amusement. His brother, meanwhile, is mostly pragmatic. The main reason why Jatemme doesn’t leave more corpses in his wake is because his brother’s holding his leash and stopping him from drawing too much attention to their operation while his campaign is going on.

The only other person in the story with a similar body count doesn’t count for a few reasons, but if I’m going to explain who they are and what they've done, it requires spoiling the entire movie, so stop reading now if you want to see the movie unspoiled. And if you haven’t seen the movie, I totally recommend seeing it cause it’s really good. Anyway, spoilers ahoy.

So, the big plot twist is that Veronica’s husband, Harry, is actually still alive. When we see the scene of his "death" play out from his perspective, it turns out he fired off a shot at the police so they would open fire, and set flammable tanks around his van so that it would explode and kill his three partners. He arranged the entire heist with Jack Mulligan, who wanted Harry to steal Jamal’s campaign money, in exchange for Jack helping Harry fake his death so Harry could run off with his lover, who’s actually one of the wives of the men he just killed, and newborn son, who is his child not his friend’s. When Veronica gets the van parked, Harry appears and tries to steal the money for himself and kill Veronica, only for Veronica to kill him instead. Harry doesn’t count for a few reasons, first off, he does appear to regret the death of his team, he genuinely loved his first son with Veronica who was killed by a racist cop during a routine traffic stop, and he still seems to care about Veronica in some capacity. His plan was for her to sell his notebook to Jamal to settle the debt, he never expected her to actually carry out his heist herself. When Veronica calls him out on everything, Harry tries to justify himself by saying their marriage was destroyed by the death of their son, and since he couldn’t save them both, he had to save himself.

Overall, the aforementioned character comes off as a desperate and pathetic weasel but not a monster. He doesn’t relish suffering like Jatemme does.

Does he have any redeeming or sympathetic qualities?
None that are readily apparent. Definitely nothing sympathetic but as for redeeming. well, his relationship with his brother is professional at best. We never see any real display of care between the two, and Jatemme does do whatever his brother orders him to do because he likes what he does. He does listen to his brother debate Jack Mulligan on the radio and he cheers when his brother scores a point against Jack, it’s not because he’s proud of his brother but is just reasserting his established dislike of Jack Mulligan.

Conclusion?
I'd give him a yes vote. There's no concrete proof that he and his brother care about each other, and Jatemme comes across as a sociopathic manchild who just enjoys hurting people. The heinous standard isn't excessive, so his blatant cruelty really does stand out. I say he keeps.