Genre: Comedy
Premise: The most feared cop in Scotland comes to L.A. to solve a case and defeat his evil nemesis.
About: From the writers of Pierre Pierre, here comes O’Gunn, a spec that Reliance snatched up during the Cannes Film Festival (Reliance is the Bollywood company that is making a huge investment in Hollywood with the production of 20 new films). It should be noted that this is a first draft and therefore not the draft that sold. Whether there was an attempt to clean it up and make it more focused, or actually push the boundaries of taste and reason even more is anyone’s guess.
Writers: Edwin Cannistraci and Frederick Seton
Edwin and Frederick. I love you guys. I really do. If I could spend a night out getting plastered with any two writers, it would be you two. Pierre Pierre was hilarious. Couldn’t get enough of it. But what just happened here was not good. Finishing O’Gunn was like waking up with a really bad hangover. The kind where you’re in some random person’s dorm room with no memory of how you got there. Oh, and you’ve already graduated college 7 years ago. And the beautiful woman next to you isn’t a woman at all, but a man. The taste of stale beer feels permanently coated to the inside of your trachea. And you swear to yourself. *Swear* to yourself. That you’ll never drink again.
It’s hard to classify O’Gunn. I think I can safely say I’ve never read anything like it. No. No. I’ve *definitely* never read anything like it. Nor do I want to read anything like it ever again. I feel like I’ve lost at least 3 of my senses. Yes, parts of my sensory perception are definitely missing. To try and explain to you what I just went through is like a soldier trying to explain urban warfare to someone who’s never seen a gun before. I feel…violated. Not sure how anyone can physically feel pain from a script. But I felt it. The only thing that I can take away from this is that Cannistraci and Seton are so insane, that they could obviously care less what I think about their script.
Scottish cop Charlie O’Gunn was born without a mother. I know. I know. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. But if you’re going to survive the barrel of O’Gunn pointed in your face for two hours, you better throw sense out the fucking window. O’Gunn is the toughest craziest cop in the existence of mankind. Think Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon with a Scottish accent times a billion.
O’Gunn’s evil nemesis, a feminine-like British laddie named Lovejoy, has just stolen one of the most elaborate telescopes in the world and nobody knows why. O’Gunn and Lovejoy have an extensive and complicated history and it is believed he is the only one who can stop this Wimbledon-loving dentist-fearing Londonite. So O’Gunn flies to Los Angeles to find and defeat Mr. Strawberries and Cream. Once there, he meets his pansy partner, the Spaniard, “Bullet” (yes – O’Gunn and Bullet). Think of Bullet as a whiny useless version of Mandy Patinkin’s character in The Princess Bride (“You killed my father. Prepare to die”).
After O’Gunn beats the living shit out of the albino Chief of Police because all albinos are soulless devil-spawns who only want to feed off the souls of mankind, he and Bullet check out a mysterious character who works at a pet store. For some reason all the pets in the pet store are dressed up in S&M gear and are on mind-control. So when things go bad, they go really bad. The animals are released and try to obliterate the poor Bullet. Bullet barely escapes with his life. Later , they’re summoned to an elementary school where there’s a bomb threat. Unfortunately, it’s a trap, and all the kids are actually on mind control as well and try to attack O’Gunn.
Mind-control Kids are defeated, which natually means that O’Gunn and Bullet must attend a cock-fight. It gets Kentucky Fried Crazy and the cock fight turns into a human fight. O’Gunn “fists” two roosters by sticking his hands up their asses and uses them as boxing gloves. This leads to a huge car chase where O’Gunn jumps a small river. We then cut to the river where we meet two Navy high-tech dolphins with translator headgear. The dolphins start talking to each other in English. Yes, you heard that right. The dolphins start talking to each other.
After O’Gunn bangs Bullet’s sister, they get a tip that Lovejoy is at the docks. O’Gunn, who by this point has overcome his fear of albinos, asks one for directions. The albino rats him out and Lovejoy captures O’Gunn and Bullet as a result. The two are tied up in a box and thrown into the river to drown. The crafty Bullet somehow escapes but poor O’Gunn isn’t so lucky. He sinks to the bottom of the river and dies. Yes, ladies and gentleman, our main character is dead.
Or is he?
Later, at the funeral, we cut to heaven, where O’Gunn and Death square off in a game of chess. When Death is least expecting it, O’Gunn beats the shit out of him, allowing him to WAKE UP AT HIS OWN FUNERAL. Yes, O’Gunn is alive again.
O’Gunn and Bullet then go to a Lesbian strip club where they’re attacked by lesbians. Oh, by the way, Lovejoy also has a clan of ninjas working for him who are involved in most of the fights. Anyway, they finally infiltrate Lovejoy’s lair and find out what the hell it is this insane man is up to. Oh yeah, and Bullet fucks O’Gunn’s wife to get back at him for fucking his sister.
And that, my friends, was O’Gunn.
Was it funny? Ummmm…hmmm. Okay, I did laugh a few times. I particularly liked that instead of parking, O’Gunn would crash into whatever building he was going to. Outside of that, I mostly wore a puzzled expression on my face. If you like complete absurdity with no reason behind it then I’m thinking you’ll like this quite a bit. But man, it felt like Cannistraci and Seton locked themselves in a room and thought up a million things to make each other laugh…without ever checking to see if anyone else was laughing. They needed that referee in the room to say, “Okay wait a minute here guys. You’ve gone too far with this one.” O’Gunn didn’t just go off the rails. It went under-fucking-ground on a one way trip to the San Andreas Fault. This makes Balls Out look like The English Patient.
In order to be fair – because I do like these guys – I got some feedback from a few of our readers. Here are some of the things they had to say:
“I get it, it’s funny. But I don’t know if my mom would get it. Then again, I’d never let her watch this movie.”
“In the wrong hands this sort of thing turns into a Mike Myers “Austin Powers” style vehicle (my heart broke a little when “Pierre” was cast with Jim Carrey) – but in the right hands it turns into “The Jerk”, mixing scatological humor (poo+pee=tee-hee) and non-sequitor anything-for-a-laugh wordplay.”
“The writers are certainly talented, and I’m sure they believed in what they were doing. And why shouldn’t they? they write with conviction and flair. But like a couple of mad scientists they chose to create a frankenstein. A big ugly freak that can barely stand up straight, let alone walk.”
“Carson, never send me a script like this again.”
In the spirit of the recently completed British Open, I’m going to give these two a mulligan and chalk it up to too much Red Bull and the always exploratory first draft . I’m hoping number 3 in their million dollar spec sale trilogy will make up for this rather…strange experience.
Script link: No link
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Comedy is subjective, but I’m a strong believer in grounding your comedy – no matter how outrageous it is – in some sort of reality. If there’s no reference point, something for the audience to hold on to, it becomes a lawless state of nonsense. At the point where the dolphins started talking to each other I was like, “Okay, that’s it. I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore.”
