“Warriors, come out and play!” Shot like a live-action comic book, Walter Hill’s cult classic The Warriors tells the story of a summit of all New York City’s street gangs. When the leader of the top gang is assassinated while proposing an all-out war against the NYPD, the titular Warriors are blamed for the killing and get relentlessly pursued across the city.
Not only does The Warriors showcase the members of its titular gang as compelling protagonists; it’s famous for all the wacky, diverse, unique gangs chasing after them, too. Here’s every gang featured in the movie, ranked by likability.
The Rogues
The Rogues, based in Hell’s Kitchen, are the absolute worst. This movie doesn’t really have any heroes, but if it has one true villain, it’s Luther, the sadistic, psychopathic leader of the Rogues. He’s the one who kills Cyrus during his proposal of war against the police, so the Rogues are the reason the Warriors are targeted in the first place.
After the killing, when Luther spots the Warriors’ Fox beginning to suspect him, he instead blames the Warriors for the killing, which gets their city-wide death warrant announced via the radio. This gang is easy to hate.
The Turnbull ACs
When the Turnbull ACs spot the Warriors in the street, they have a pretty good idea for how to take them down. They come speeding after them in a bus and try to run them all down. Fortunately, the Warriors are able to escape in time. They hurry up onto an elevated train station, where the ACs’ bus can’t get to them. Before the ACs can storm the station and kill them, the Warriors manage to hop on a train and escape.
For all intents and purposes, the ACs are just as sadistic and unhinged as the Rogues. But the ACs get extra points for likability because they’re at least playful about their sadism.
The Baseball Furies
At Manhattan’s 96th Street and Broadway station, the Warriors get separated while fleeing from police officers. Swan, Ajax, Snow, and Cowboy are all chased into Riverside Park by the Baseball Furies, where the two gangs get into an intense brawl that the Warriors just about manage to win.
A bunch of gangsters who hang around the park at night with baseball bats, waiting for unsuspecting people to beat to death, are hardly the toast of the town. The Baseball Furies may be despicable, but unlike the Rogues, at least they’re creative about their gang uniforms. Viewers of The Warriors can’t help but like a gang who are fans of America’s National Pastime.
The Punks
After reuniting with the surviving Warriors at the Union Square station, Swan and Mercy and the rest of the gang are confronted by the Punks, a gang whose distinctive quirk is that they roller-skate everywhere (which isn’t particularly practical in a fight). As with all the other gangs, the weaknesses of the Punks are used to highlight the strength of the Warriors.
The skates give the Punks a pretty unintimidating presence. The Punks are a bunch of ruthless criminals like the rest of the gangs, but the fact that they ride around on skates gives them a goofy quirk that makes them more lovable than their fellow violent delinquents.
The Lizzies
The Lizzies are an all-female gang who use their sexuality to lull the Warriors into a false sense of security. They pretend to seduce them and invite them back to their hideout, where they launch a sneak attack that the Warriors barely manage to escape. It isn’t until they’re attacked by the Lizzies that the Warriors realize why they’re being targeted: everybody in New York thinks they killed Cyrus.
By using their intelligence as their main weapon of choice, the Lizzies can’t help but be respected and liked for how deftly they navigate New York City’s brutal gang wars.
The Orphans
As far as New York’s gangs go, the Orphans rank pretty low. They weren’t even invited to Cyrus’ summit. When a fire on the subway strands the Warriors in Tremont, they’re attacked by the Orphans, but Swan dispatches them pretty quickly with a Molotov cocktail. Mercy, the girlfriend of the Orphans’ leader, is so impressed with the Warriors and so disappointed with her own boyfriend that she abandons the Orphans and joins the guys with a hit on their heads instead.
The fact that the Orphans aren’t very well-respected among the gang community makes them the underdogs. They’re insecure about being left out of Cyrus’ big gang summit, which makes them endearing.
The Gramercy Riffs
The Gramercy Riffs are introduced in The Warriors as the most powerful criminal enterprise in New York City. Their charismatic leader, Cyrus, hosts a summit of all the city’s gangs to propose waging war against the police as one big gang unit. If they are united, he reasons, all of New York’s gangs outnumber the NYPD’s officers three to one.
The Riffs prove themselves to be fair when new evidence comes to light. They sent the entire criminal underbelly of New York looking for the Warriors, but when a third-party witness came to them to say they’d seen the Rogues kill Cyrus, they call off the hit. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the Rogues themselves from going after the Warriors on their own Coney Island turf in the final scene.
The Warriors
Ultimately, the greatest gang in The Warriors is the plucky titular group themselves. As a group that every other gang in the city wants dead, the Warriors are quintessential underdogs. The mere fact that it’s wildly unlikely that they’ll survive the night makes them easy to root for because it’s a very unenviable situation.
But the characters themselves are endearing, too. Michael Beck’s Swan manages to find love while he’s fleeing for his life, while Thomas G. Waites’ Fox does his best to talk their way out of violent confrontations. A large reason why fans enjoy The Warriors so much is because of Walter Hill’s hyper-stylized violence, but that violence would be empty and unengaging if it didn’t involve characters that viewers could really care about.