Genre: Spy Action Thriller
Premise: (from Hit List) A former assassin, turned reformed housewife and mother, faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath she accidentally left alive after she wiped out the rest of her family.
About: This script got 24 votes on last year’s Hit List, which put it in the top 35. Erica Schreiber was repped at WME (before the strike) and got her start working as an assistant in the writer’s room for Monk. Most recently she got a stab at the upcoming Micronauts movie.
Writer: Erica Schreiber
Details: 117 pages
We’re sticking with the Russian theme this week! Which makes absolutely no sense, since July 4th is Independence Day in the U.S. Maybe tomorrow I’ll review a Murican script to balance it out.
Today we’re getting another radiation dose of the Jane Wick trend. But this one is a little different. Having finished the script an hour ago, I’m having trouble categorizing it. That should be a good thing. You don’t want your John/Jane Wick spec to feel like everyone else’s. But you don’t want it to be too out there either. We need a sense of what kind of movie we’re watching.
Mia is a CIA spy in the heart of Russia. Her and her partner, Dale, shake down a Russian spy for some weapons info. Mia not only shoots the man and his wife dead afterwards, but their 10 year old son as well. The two then use the info Mia retrieved to infiltrate a Russian bio-weapons lab. Afterwards, Mia runs off with another spy, Guy, to ditch the spy life and start a family in the suburbs.
Cut to 13 years later and the now 40-something Mia is living a boring life as a real estate agent with Guy and their 12 year old daughter, Case. But mere pages after we’ve established Mia’s new reality, both her workplace and every car on the block blow up. Out of nowhere comes a psycho chick named Serena who we’ll later find out was hiding in the house that day Mia killed her family. Mia tries to get to her family but watches in horror as Guy and Case are blown up in their car. Serena informs Mia that she’s not going to kill her yet, then disappears.
We then jump back in time to meet Serena as a little child. We watch her befriend a Russian gangster, learn how to kill, search for the woman who killed her family, move to the U.S. as a 17 year old via a Russian online wedding service, lose her virginity to her new husband, start killing all her new husband’s friends who she doesn’t like, and eventually locate Mia.
Meanwhile, while that ongoing flashback is happening, we’re watching Mia put the pieces together, reconnect with her old partner Dale, and try to find out what the heck is going on. Remember, she had no idea there even was a girl in the house that day. Eventually the two find out Serena wants to take her on at a mall for some reason. So Mia shows up there and we have a big mall battle, complete with a collapsing escalator that chews up pairs of mall shoppers.
After that showdown, when things are at their lowest, Mia learns that Case is still alive! Serena is holding her. Mia gets in touch with one last ally to come up with a plan to charge into the lion’s den and take this psycho girl down for good.
One thing I give 13 Years Later credit for is keeping me on my toes. Every time I thought I had a handle on this movie, Schreiber would throw a curve ball at me. It’s rare that you set up a character as extensively as Guy, the husband, was, then kill him off in a blink-and-you-miss-it car explosion. Case too. Although she later comes back into the story via a twist.
I also liked the initial setup – or what I thought the movie was going to be – which was two top-level killers laying waste to a suburb in an effort to be the last woman standing. The script’s best moments are when we’re focused on that. Like the mall showdown. But that’s not what the script ends up being. Just when we’ve set up our adversaries, we flash back to get to know everybody better and learn how they got here.
I’m not going to get into some big rant about flashbacks. We’ve covered that to death here. And to Schreiber’s credit, helping us understand Serena better does give the spy vs. spy set pieces more emotional weight. But to me, the juice (the flashbacks) wasn’t worth the squeeze. The story is the present, not the past. And when it comes to movies, that’s where you want to be 99% of the time. Novels are good for learning about character backstories. But movies shine brightest when they’re in the now. Especially with an action movie like this.
Another issue I had with the script was the tone. 13 Years Later wants to be this John Wick like piece of popcorn entertainment. That’s clear from lines like this one from Serena: “I remember thinking you were a monster. Watching you murder my family from a fucking closet. But now you’re just another suburban mommy in her 40s who only kills bottles of Chardonnay.” But then it also has a hero who kills a 10 year old boy in the opening scene and then later shoots a cop in her face. Or a 17 year old who sneaks into the U.S. as a mail order bride and has sex with her much older new husband. I can’t marry those two extremes in the same movie. You gotta pick one or the other.
Personally, I would embrace the absurdity of this premise and just have fun with it. This is an 80s Schwarzenegger flick in disguise. I mean a showdown at the mall where people are falling into collapsed escalators? Why would you want to add extremely mature themes to that? This is a fun situation. An entire suburb as a chess piece with two characters using every gun and explosive in their arsenal to take each other down.
This was a good case where you could anticipate the problems in the logline itself. When you see the words, “faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath,” you’re imagining a comedy. That word, “millennial,” isn’t typically used in a serious manner. So every time someone makes a joke here, you’re thinking, “Okay, I understand this movie.” But then your hero blows off the head of an innocent old man at a bar and you’re like, “Whoa. I don’t understand this at all.”
Tone is one of those things that’s hard to get a handle on. But basically, the larger the gap between your most humorous moment and your most serious moment, the more tonal issue you’re going to have. Put simply, the plot here isn’t serious enough to support a character this dark.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Think real hard about who your character kills. If you’re going to have them kill an innocent person, the reader will struggle to like them. And if they willingly kill an innocent child? I can guarantee you they won’t like them. Truth be told, I don’t think it’s possible to come back from a hero willingly killing a child. If there’s a single example of the opposite being the case, I don’t remember it. But if anyone comes up with one in the comments, maybe we can figure out why it worked.
