Genre: Thriller
Premise: Whilst performing an autopsy, a forensic pathologist suspects the body is from the future on a failed mission to prevent a world catastrophe. He must now decide whether to continue the mission, a task that requires bombing a commercial airliner on a transatlantic flight.
Why You Should Read: Money problems. Custody battles. Drinking on the job. A penchant for violence. 48 Hour Token is a high concept thriller that demands a common but deeply flawed man to prevent a world catastrophe whilst fighting to keep his sanity. To save the world, it’s usually expected you must don the spandex to fight the battle between good and evil. In the real world, the protagonists often come with baggage and the room for failure is non existent. — This isn’t a blind submission. In preparation for this Amateur Offerings, I have utilised several coverage services that most followers of this website would be familiar with. 48 Hour Token has been labelled a ‘well constructed thriller’ with ‘multiple, diverse elements’ whilst containing ‘realistic dialogue for the genre’.
Writer: Branko Maksic
Details: 115 pages
I always like Branko’s insights in the comments section so I’m excited to see what he has in store for us. Let’s check it out…
41 year old Patrick Crawley is an alcoholic pathologist who’s going through a messy divorce. After a particularly nasty argument with his ex-wife, Esmeralda, he goes to determine the cause of death of his latest dead body, only to find a bloated corpse that was discovered in the sea with its face smashed in. Yummy. While poking around, Patrick finds a key for a safe deposit box in the dead dude’s stomach!
Hoping by some miracle this key will lead to cash that will nab him the best lawyer in town (which will allow him to get custody of his daughter), Patrick instead gets a USB drive and two tokens. He plugs the drive into his computer to find a movie file where some woman claiming to be from the future is talking about saving the world from a terrorist attack. Feeling its his civic duty to find out more, he seeks this woman out, but she ends up dead.
Soon after, Patrick is cornered by the Chinese, who administer a toxin that paralyzes his body but not his other senses. Patrick is carried into a hotel room where a woman performs fellatio on him to secure his sperm, and then tells him that if he continues to snoop around, they’re going to kill his daughter and insert the semen into her rectum to make it look like he assaulted and killed her. Not nice people these terrorists.
Patrick ignores this warning for some reason, possibly because he’s beginning to believe that mankind is truly in danger. The Chinese’s plan seems to revolve around having a doctor carry a super-toxin on a flight to America and then letting it free so that everyone in America dies. Somehow, Patrick has to stop that from happening. Unfortunately, he finds out that he was duped and the doctor is a decoy. A separate woman with the real toxin is on a different flight that has already left for America.
Luckily, Patrick gains access to a time machine that allows him to go back in time and try again. And this time he has the help of Past Patrick, allowing the two to divide and conquer. Will they stop the decimation of America in time? Or is this all happening whether they succeed at their plan or not?
(A quick apology to Branko if I missed anything here. The plot was a little hard to follow at times)
This is an interesting one because Branko clearly knows what he’s doing. He knows how to hook us with a dead body teaser. He knows that that’s going to give him time to thoughtfully introduce his characters. His first scene with our lead, Patrick, is packed with conflict, like all good scenes should be. We get to see Patrick at his job, allowing us to grow closer to him. And before we get bored, Branko introduces a mystery – a key inside the body. While we eagerly await that mystery box to be opened, Branko uses the time to develop Patrick even more. We see him interacting with his daughter. We see him talking with his dead dad at the cemetery. If this were a test on writing first acts, Branko would ace it.
Yet something was bothering me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then it hit me.
How you introduce your hero is one of the most important scenes in a script. Some might argue it’s THE most important. The reason for this is that the first scene has a huge impact on how we view that character. Therefore, if we don’t like the hero in that first scene, it doesn’t matter if you ace the first act test. A part of us checked out after that intro. And that’s where the problem was here.
Patrick is introduced as an angry aggressive person. He’s saying a lot of bad things to his ex-wife. He admits to clocking her in the face for cheating on him. While movies are all about exploring character flaws, anger is a tricky one. It’s hard to identify with someone when our first impression of them is pure rage. I mean, think about if you met someone in real life who’s going off on some angry tirade. Would you be like, “Hey dude, what are you doing later? Want to hang out?” Because that’s what you’re asking us to do here. Hang out with Angry Yelling Man for the next two hours. I would never say something’s impossible. But I was never 100% Team Patrick in this script, and I think meeting him this way was why.
But even that wasn’t the whole reason. There was something else bothering me about the first act so I went back and reread it. Eventually, I figured it out. The storytelling was too technical. You could see the writer’s mind at work in each scene. “This is the scene where I set up what he does for a living.” “This is the scene where we show he loves his kid more than anything.” There wasn’t enough flow. It didn’t feel organic enough.
I know Branko is going to kill me for this comparison, but if you read the beginning of Juno, you’re not really aware that a movie is being set up. We feel like we’re organically following this girl around during a particularly disruptive time in her life. I don’t want to confuse Branko by pretending that Juno and 48 Hour Token are anything alike. However, I think he could benefit from a looser more organic storytelling style and not this mathematical dissection of scenes where it’s too obvious what he’s doing. Just because a scene passes the Screenwriting 101 Test doesn’t mean it’s connecting emotionally with the audience.
Despite all this, I still felt the logline teased some juicy ideas, particularly the stuff with the plane, so I was confused when I got to page 35 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then page 45 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then the halfway point passed and we still weren’t on the plane. They keep talking about a plane. Why aren’t we on a plane?
At a certain point, I realized we weren’t getting on that plane, and once I realized that, I had a hard time grasping what kind of movie I was watching. It didn’t seem to fit inside of any known template. Some people will argue that this is a good thing. If a movie isn’t fitting inside a template, it’s original! You’re not going to know what happens next! And while that’s a valid argument, it all depends on if you’re actually enjoying the ride. I wouldn’t say I WASN’T enjoying the ride here. But I was only casually invested.
I suppose if I were to pitch this, I might call it a sci-fi version of Chinatown. And if you’re reading it through that lens, you might enjoy it. But for me I was too often lost in this story. Even though there was a clear goal (stop the world-ending killer virus), the plot points seemed to arrive in a way that was at odds with the plot. Our Chinese super-villains didn’t show up until the midpoint. Our time-travel didn’t get used until the final act. The plane, which is the whole point of the story, doesn’t arrive until the very very end. If you were a fly on my wall while I was reading this, you would’ve repeatedly heard me say, “Earlier.” “Earlier.” “Earlier.” I wanted everything to happen earlier.
Having now read the script, I would advise Branko to take the plane out of the logline. Just make clear that it’s a whodunnit with a sci-fi time travel twist. At least this way, you won’t have anyone going in thinking this is a plane thriller then be disappointed that it’s a traditional sci-fi noir procedural.
Curious to see what others thought. Share your reviews in the comments section!
Script link: 48 Hour Token
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Stay away from “try-hard” descriptions. They always take readers out of the story. When it comes to description, it’s better to be clear than clever. One character here is described as, “Possesses skin so healthy that it radiates its own moral laws.” Another one is described as, “A hummingbird of naked nerve endings.” Neither of these really make sense.
