alt title(s): An Offer You Cant Refuse
Michael: My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Kay: What was that?
Michael: Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his signature or his brains would be on the paper.
Sometimes a bad guy wants something done, something none of his own men are up to the task of doing for some reason (too well known, too incompetent, whatever), and he's not about to risk his own hide in order to do it. So what's a bad guy to do?
He gets in touch with a good guy and makes him an Offer He Can't Refuse.
There are a number of reasons that the offer Can't Be Refused, of course:
- The bad guy has a loved one of yours held hostage, or threatens to do something nasty to said loved one if the hero refuses.
- If the people the bad guy is targeting have taken the loved one instead, working with the bad guy is a way to rescue the loved one and take down the kidnappers.
- The bad guy is blackmailing the hero in some way, using some past actual or perceived fault or failure of the hero as leverage against him in order to force him to do the job for him.
- Maybe the hero is out for revenge and he and the bad guy share the same enemy for once.
- Something dearly important to the hero is on the line (the Ill Girl or someone else suffering from Soap Opera Disease is an all-time favorite).
- Sometimes the hero's own life is on the line, and it would be rather stupid to refuse him.
- It would be a shame if the shop that's been in your family for generations suddenly had an "electrical fire".
Either way, it usually turns out that by doing the job, the hero has been advancing some form of
Xanatos Gambit orchestrated by the bad guy, and there's at least a fifty-fifty chance that the bad guy will
double-cross the hero at some point along the way, usually in a
You Have Outlived Your Usefulness moment. This often leads to the hero launching an all-guns-blazing assault on the bad guy, either to get revenge on him, rescue the loved one, or both.
The trope name comes from the movie
The Godfather where the titular mafia boss was always making people offers (such as letting one of his favorites star in a movie or signing a business over to him) with dire consequences attached if they were refused (like, say, a bullet in the head, getting put in the hospital, or having the head of the person's prize horse being delivered to his bed).
Compare
Enemy Mine, in which the bad guy accompanies the hero.
Examples:
- Vladimir Lem from the first Max Payne makes Max one of these offers. Being a cop, Max isn't really inclined to deal with mob guys to start with, but since Max is on the run from the law for a crime he didn't commit and waging a one-man war on Punchinello's syndicate, Max accepts his offer to go after Boris Dime, a former Vladimir lieutenant who has joined Punchinello, in exchange for enough guns to go after Punchinello.
- Technically, Max is under absolutely no obligation to accept Lem's deal: there's no implicit or explicit mention of a penalty for refusing. The reason Max goes along with the deal is three-fold: to get his hands on powerful weaponry, to piss off Punchinello, and to gain a potential ally.
- Vlad lives up to the trope in the second game, using the good will he earned in the first game to advance his plans for a while longer before revealing himself as the true Big Bad.
- Mr. Wong from John Woo's Stranglehold makes Tequila one of these offers as well. This time, the offer is to rescue his daughter Billie and her daughter Teko from the Golden Kane and the Zakarovs. Given Tequila's Star Crossed Lovers and the fact that Teko is his daughter as well, this is an offer Tequila can't afford to pass up.
- The G-Man makes one of these to Gordon Freeman at the end of the original Half Life. Canon establishes that Gordon accepted the offer to work for him - refusing the G-Man results in Freeman being dumped into a horde of hostile alien monsters without a single weapon, which would make the odds of Half-Life 2 ever happening pretty much nil.
- Most of the plot in the video game Kane and Lynch. The main protagonist, Kane, is tracked down by his old mercenary partners and is forced to recover their lost fortune. In order to motivate Kane, the mercenaries take his wife and daughter hostage.
- Lost: Ben gets Jack to do his spinal surgery by also kidnapping Kate and Sawyer (Kate to control Jack, and Sawyer to control Kate, apparently.)
- Fire Emblem 4: One of the bosses in the battle with Thracia strong-arms General Hannibal into fighting Celice's army by taking his adoptive son Corple hostage.
- Prison Break: The plot of the entire third season has the villainous Company kidnapping Michael Scofield's girlfriend and Lincoln Burrows' son, and threatening to kill them unless the brothers break an inmate out of a Panamanian prison.
- At the beginning of The Dresden Files novel Dead Beat, Black Court vampire Mavra strong-arms Harry Dresden into finding a book of black magic for her, by threatening his friend Karrin Murphy. He takes the job, but at the end of the book tells her if she ever, ever tries anything like that again he'll do whatever is necessary to kill her, and to hell with the cost.
