Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) When a veteran hitwoman is mysteriously poisoned on her last assignment in Tokyo, she has 24 hours to track down her killer before she dies.
About: Before today’s script made the bottom half of last year’s Black List, it got a 25 million dollar production commitment from Netflix… WITHOUT A DIRECTOR OR CAST. Wow. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Actually, I don’t think it’s ever happened. It goes to show that Netflix, in its bid to become the ultimate entertainment destination even if that means going bankrupt, is willing to disrupt any and all models they can. The writer, Umair Aleem, just made headlines yesterday for getting the high profile gig, “Danger Girl,” a comic book inspired by Charlie’s Angels, James Bond, and Indiana Jones, if that’s possible.
Writer: Umair Aleem
Details: 120 pages
I have a feeling today’s script is going to make some of you angry. I mean, it’s another Jane Wick spec – aka, the most unoriginal trend in Hollywood history. But I encourage you to see the light at the end of this tunnel. Writer writes spec. Writer gets direct commitment from Netflix. Writer gets high profile gig in the same vein as his spec. I’d hope everyone would champion that seeing as it means THESE SORTS OF THINGS HAPPEN. And therefore it could happen to you. And as much as spec sales rock, they don’t come anywhere CLOSE to production commitments. Who cares if you sell a spec that never gets made?
Kate is the best hitman/hitwoman who’s ever held a gun. Seriously? Isn’t that always the case with these movies? When are they going to make a movie about an average hitman? Anyway, we open on Kate telling her longtime handler, Varrick, she wants to retire after this hit. He doesn’t like it but he promises to talk to the Firm and see if they’ll release her.
Before Kate, who’s in Tokyo, executes the hit, she has sex with a male prostitute. Then off she goes to assassinate a prominent Japanese something-or-other. Right before she pulls the trigger, she feels an unimaginable pain all over her body. She refocuses, but the pain only gets worse. Somehow, she’s able to kill her target, but she passes out before waking up in a hospital.
They tell her she’s been poisoned with uranium and has less than 15 hours to live. Oh, and her death will be unimaginably painful.
There ain’t a whole lot to do during the last 15 hours of your life than figure out who poisoned you and kill them so off Kate goes, starting with Varrick, crossing him off the list, then the prostitute, satisfied he didn’t do anything. So then it’s time to check the heavy hitters. The Yakuza.
She works her way up to the two biggest families in town, the Sumiyoshis and the Kozakuras, killing entire armies of men to get to the top brass and question why they wanted her killed. But everyone she talks to has no idea what she’s talking about.
Along the way, she saves a 12 year old girl named Ani who, coincidentally, was being used as bait to lure in, guess who? That would be the mark she killed earlier. So now she’s walking around with the girl who she’s just made fatherless. But the two form a close bond, and therefore when Ani gets taken a second time, Kate will have to make a decision what to do with the last hour of her life – find out who her killer is, or go save the girl. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll achieve both.
I constantly preach on this site – GO SIMPLE! Write a simple easy-to-understand plot. A group of people go to a dinosaur park. The dinosaurs get loose and the people must escape. Simple, right?
But when is simple TOO simple? Is a woman who’s been poisoned looking for her killer enough to keep us engaged for 2 hours? Or is there a floor for how simple a concept can be?
A premise is too simple when, despite a clear goal, stakes, and urgency, you don’t do anything original with the execution.
That means either your characters have to be really interesting or you need a location that we haven’t seen before or a situation that’s fresh and unexpected or a plot that takes some risks or you need to have a voice that’s unlike any other writer out there.
Otherwise, if all you’re doing is giving us a generic, “Hero needs to get from Point A to Point B or something terrible happens” plot, it’s going to be too simple.
I’ll give you an example of another hitwoman script that got this write. It was called Ballerina. In that script, we end up in a weird Swiss Alps town and find out that everybody who lives in this town is a hitman, and they’ve been breeding hitmen for centuries.
Weird? Yes. A choice that works for everyone? No. But at least it was unique. At least it was something I hadn’t seen before. And that’s what you should be looking to integrate when you have an absurdly simple concept, like “Kate.” At several junctures during the story, we’ve got to feel that this is different from what we’ve seen before.
So was Aleem able to achieve this?
Well, his voice is a little different. He writes in the Walter Hill style of screenwriting, where the action is short and single-spaced. This fragmented style gives the script a unique feel right off the bat, which helps offset some of the simplicity of the premise.
The setting is a little different as well. I’m not sure we’ve ever had a female action-thriller set in Tokyo. I don’t know how much credit I should give for this since we’ve obviously seen plenty of male action scripts set there. But I admit it helped things feel a little different.
And Kate herself, while hardly a world-changing heroine, is a cold-hearted sociopath who had a double mastectomy to prevent the future possibility of breast cancer. I’m not sure how much I liked that choice. But it’s different. And it’s the kind of thing I can see an actress being excited to play.
Finally, I liked the choice of having the girl she saved be the daughter of the man she killed. I say that as someone who’s read lots of similar plots where the kid our hero saves has no connection to them whatsoever. And how that makes the relationship a lot less interesting.
All of these choices helped elevate “Kate” beyond amateur status.
After that, however, it’s standard stuff. We go question Suspect A. He mentions Suspect B. So we go see him. He mentions Suspect C. We go to him. He mentions suspect D. We go see him. It was a very linear repetitive narrative. And once you get in a rhythm like that, the reader gets too comfortable. They know that the next guy you visit is just going to tell us to visit the next guy. Because that’s what you’ve been doing for the past 45 pages.
I wrote an article once about In and Out. The idea behind the article was you want equal amounts of your hero imposing herself upon the story (“Out”) and the story imposing itself upon your hero (“In”). The move from one suspect to the next was all Out Out Out Out Out Out. It wasn’t until the girl arrives, which was after the midpoint, that we got an In. Aleem could’ve used more Ins.
With that said, I genuinely didn’t know who poisoned Kate. And I was surprised by just how much I wanted to know. And when we finally get the answer, I was satisfied (for reasons I’ll get into in the What I Learned section). For that accomplishment alone, this is worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
POTENTIAL SPOILERS!
What I learned: Whoever the killer is in your murder-mystery, you must 100% eliminate them as a possibility early on. You can’t trick audiences these days. There are only so many suspects to choose from. We’re going to figure it out. So what you do is you create a scene or a scenario whereby we know, for a fact, that your killer isn’t your killer. If you look back to Kevin Williamson’s “Scream,” there was a moment where we thought the killer was the boyfriend. But soon after, the boyfriend is with our hero, Sydney, while the next killing happens. We now know, for a fact, he’s not the guy (but then he ends up being the guy). Here, [The Killer] is the first person Kate goes to. She sits him down and asks him if he’s involved. It’s just a scene of them talking, but afterwards, we’re convinced this guy would never hurt Kate. Of course, in the end, it turns out he was just a really good actor.
