Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: After a real estate agent in the richest suburb in America is brutally murdered in a home she was showing, a Boston detective zeroes in on her dangerous ex-boyfriend.
About: This will be Grant Singer’s official feature directing debut. Singer is best known for directing Super Bowl singer, The Weekend’s, videos. You can see one of those videos here. Singer co-wrote the script with Ben Brewer. The film will star Benicio Del Toro.
Writer: Grant Singer & Ben Brewer
Details: 127 pages
Guys, before we get started, SEND ME THE SCRIPT TO BULLET TRAIN (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I have to find out what’s attracting all these actors to this movie. Most scripts have 1 or 2 juicy parts. Outliers have 3 or 4. But for a script to have this many interesting characters that they’ve nabbed this many big actors?? I have to know what’s going on. So send it to me! I will buy an animal style double-double from In and Out in your honor.
Okay, on to today’s screenplay.
I went into this script not knowing much about it. When I began to realize it was a murder investigation story, I tensed up. These are incredibly difficult stories to do anything new with. You’re not only competing with similar movies that came before it. But a good 70 years of television has been covering this genre as well. I mean, how are you going to come up with any murder scenario that’s unique at this point?
For this reason, these scripts tend to depend on the strength of their characters. The characters have to be above and beyond your average movie characters if the script is even going to sniff ‘decent’ territory. Let’s find out if Reptile was able to achieve this.
30-something Will Grady is the kind of rich you only become if you were born into money. And Will was definitely that. His mother, Camille, is richer than anybody in town. She’s also attached to Will at the hip. If you marry Will, you marry his mother.
Which is probably why Will’s wife, Summer, is so bummed out. It seems like every occasion she and her husband attend includes Mommy Dearest. Well, that’s not going to happen much longer. Cause when Summer (who’s a real estate agent) goes to show a new house, she’s brutally murdered inside of it.
Local detective and all-around good guy, Nichols, comes onto the case, and the immediate suspect is Summer’s ex-boyfriend. Word around town was that he always used to beat her up. Feels like an open-and-shut case. But the further Nichols digs, the more complicated things get.
For example, every one of the houses Summer has sold this year is currently empty. She may have been involved in a scam whereby she helped wealthy criminals launder money. And, if that’s the case, it means the ex-boyfriend is the least of Nichols’ worries. In fact, the more Nichols keeps pushing, the more he realizes no one wants to help him – even his own police department. Could they be involved in this?
Just when things can’t get any worse, Nichols learns that some podcaster is out there chronicling the case in real time, giving the potential bad guys important information that can help them win their case, should it go to trial.
But Nichols pushes on and eventually learns that the companies who have been buying all these houses from Summer are connected to Will’s mom herself! Is she the one who murdered Summer? Or could it be someone close to her?
Reptile suffers from the problem I noted at the outset. It’s not giving us anything new. There was one tiny moment where Nichols confronts the podcaster where I thought, “Okay, I’ve never seen this before.” But, in the end, it was no different from detectives having to fend off traditional media. It was just that the form of the media was new.
With that said, the script is pretty good. It’s certainly better than the last movie that came out in this genre – The Little Things – because, ironically, it does a lot of the little things differently. For example, we spend a lot of time inside the crime scene throughout the first three-quarters of the screenplay, and the writers deliberately don’t show us the body. They keep hinting at how horrific the murder is, which does a wonderful job of keeping the reader turning the pages. The longer you don’t show the crash, the more we’re going to want to see the crash! So that was smart.
Also, the relationship between Will and his mother felt different. I’m sure one of these crime procedural shows have done a mommy-son suspect thing before. But there was something fresh about this emasculated husband that made him interesting. We find out, at some point, that Summer was still sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, the guy who used to beat her. So the fact that this woman was resisting a “perfect” life to be with this abusive terrible person made the characters a bit more complex.
I found myself wondering what I was supposed to feel. I didn’t like the husband, Will. And, of course, I didn’t like the ex-boyfriend. But, in a way, I didn’t like Summer either. Because she was cheating on her husband to willingly be with this man who abused her. It didn’t exactly endear me to her. Yet when you were in a room with Will and his mom, you could see how someone would perceive that as a living hell. So you kind of sympathized with her choice as well.
I give the script credit for that. It makes you think. And it makes you think about uncomfortable things.
But the script was plagued with a lingering messiness that, like a groundhog, kept peeking its way above the surface. Important information wasn’t always presented clearly. For example, the first thing we’re told when Summer is showing this house is that all the houses on the block are empty. So what does that tell you? That this is a poor neighborhood, right? Everybody went bankrupt and left town. The suburb is dead.
However, 70-some pages later, another detective casually mentions that this is the richest suburb in the entire nation. Uh, what? How was I supposed to know that? Little blips like that would show up every 20 pages or so that kept me from really being able to invest in the story.
I also think this is an example of having a certain vision of what you want to do in a script and not changing that vision when it’s clear that certain things aren’t working. The podcaster guy had some interesting moments. But he had no broader connection to the story. In other words, if you got rid of him, nothing else in the story changes. This is all about Nichols. It’s his investigation to win or lose. The podcaster is an annoyance. And with the script being 127 pages, you can probably excise 15 of those just by getting rid of him.
Remember. You only want to include things in your story that push it forward. If characters aren’t pushing the story forward, you have to decide whether to keep them or not. Good writers are able to make that difficult call. They don’t want to get rid of characters they like and that they’ve spent so much time developing. But they know it’s best for the story.
If you’re into slow dark murder investigation movies, you’ll probably like this. Despite its occasional messiness and familiarity, the plot has been well thought-out and, therefore, results in a satisfying climax. It ain’t going to break any streaming records. But it’ll be worth watching.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Extremes help a logline. If you can say that something in your idea is the “biggest,” “the most dangerous,” “the richest,” “the most decorated,” “the CEO of the most successful company in the United States.” Extremes like that add weight to your idea. Cause you’re not just talking about any old thing. This is the biggest, the best, the most important! That’s why people pay attention. “After a real estate agent in the richest suburb in America is brutally murdered in a home she was showing, a Boston detective zeroes in on her dangerous ex-boyfriend.”
