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Genre: Thriller
Premise: A Pentester (ethical hacker who plans cyber attacks to help organizations identify security vulnerabilities) is set up in the murder of one of the richest most influential men in the world.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is also a director. His most recent movie is the 2020 film, Cagefighter.
Writer: Jesse Quiñones
Details: 122 pages
On-the-run thrillers are tough to pull off because your hero is doing so much running that it’s hard to add plot beyond the typical, “The cops are getting closer.” “The hero barely escapes them once again.” “Got to get the MacGuffin.” So the scripts end up being front-loaded. The first act where all the espoionagy stuff is happening is fun. Then, after that, it’s run-run-run-as-fast-as-you-can.
It still shocks me how good The Fugitive was at evading this trap. One thing it did better than any chase movie I’ve ever seen is it made Richard Kimble look like he was for sure caught in every set piece. And then, somehow, he would escape at the last second. That image of Samuel Gerard shooting Kimble in the head but the bullets are stopped at the last second by the bulletproof glass – that was movie heaven.
Anyway, let’s see if today’s script can dance on the same floor as The Fugitive.
30-something Kris is a pentester. He’s hired by companies to break into their systems and retrieve data. He’s helped 200 companies expose where their weaknesses are. He’s got his own “Q” in Maria, who guides him through an earpiece whenever he goes into a company. And there’s a budding romance between the two as well.
Kris is hired by a guy named Noah who is a 3rd party security advisor for a social media site called Kinetic. Kinetic has a unique “Mission Impossible 1” type security system that can’t be breached remotely. So Kris goes in to breach it from the inside, using an unsuspecting employee named Gwen to gain access.
But while downloading data from their server, he hears a scream and runs into the office area to find that the CEO, Milton Metcalfe, has been stabbed. A masked man attacks Kris, trying to grab the jump drive he used for the company server, but is unsuccessful and flees. Kris quickly puts together that he’s been set up and will now be the primary suspect in Milton’s murder. So he hides the jump drive before getting arrested.
When Kris realizes the cops aren’t buying his story, he escapes. From there, it’s a classic Fugitive scenario. He has to evade the pursuing cops while trying to figure out and prove Noah’s ultimate plan. His ace in the hole is that hidden jump drive. If he could get that, he may have the information he needs to prove he had nothing to do with this. But how exactly is he going to get that drive?
The Pentester is one of those script reads that has you gritting your teeth and balling your fists because it’s always on the cusp of being good but then something comes along to hold it back.
The first half of this script is really fun. It’s a little light in the way that it deals with its subject matter. But it’s still fun. And you love the irony. This guy who makes a living by making people look like fools has a fool made out of him. For once, he is the mark. Everything throughout those first 30-40 pages delivered on the promise of that premise.
But then the first hiccup arrived. Kris kills the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg. And there are… how many cops looking for him? Two cops. Two local cops are hunting down the prime suspect who murdered Mark Zuckerberg?
I remember with The Fugitive that Richard Kimble’s face was all over the news in Chicago because he was a wealthy doctor and it was a salacious story that he “killed” his wife. Well, I would imagine that this story here would be 1000 times bigger? Possibly 10,000 times with social media? But the script never addresses that.
As you’re digesting that oversight, the script pulls you back in. The cops toss his place up and find out he has a father in prison. They go get the father, release him in a trade for information, and the father starts putting together his own little mobile tech station to help out his son. It was cool! I was back in!
But then Kris mopes back into Gwen’s life, Gwen being the one he tricked during a fake date in order to GET access to Kinetic and “kill” the CEO, and she not only lets him into her place… SHE SLEEPS WITH HIM!
Just hang with me for a second on that one. You work for Elon Musk. Some guy cons you into giving you info that allows him to break in and steal vital information from Twitter – a mistake that will come back to you if the police learn you’re involved. And then you sleep with the guy when he comes back later. The guy that the entire world is talking about as the killer of Elon Musk. Put legal ramifications aside. In 2024, with the way social media attacks and cancels people, you wouldn’t be able to do anything for the rest of your life, you’d get raked over the coals so badly. I understand carnal desire. But no one’s that stupid.
We often talk about delivering on the Promise of the Premise. But you also must deliver on the Promise of the Genre. If you’re writing in the comedy genre, you gotta be funny. If you’re writing in the Action genre, you gotta have great action set pieces. And if you’re writing in the espionage thriller genre, you need the plot beats built around espionage to be convincing. The laziness of that plot point was the dagger that made this script stagger (more on this below).
I’m not saying it killed the script. But it wounded it.
That’s what was so frustrating about this script is that it *did* have good thriller moments. You need to shock and surprise readers in this genre. And the writer did so consistently. (Spoiler) He built this really likable character in Kris’s partner, Maria. So when she’s killed off in a quick and brutal way, I didn’t see it coming.
But the writer took too many scenes and plot beats off. “Taking scenes off” means, “Oh, I wrote a good scene there. So the next two scenes don’t have to be great.” Or, “I wrote a great set piece there. So it doesn’t matter that the next one is only kind of good.” You can’t take scenes off in a script. I mean, you can. But you decrease the chances of hitting that home run that wins everyone over.
I was so down the middle with this script that I knew it was going to come down to the ending. If it was good, the script gets a positive grade. Average or bad, negative grade. The ending was… okay. A Russian warlord comes in but it makes sense. This movie is about controlling information over social media and a Russian wanted access to Kinetic users in order to manipulate the next election. And we even get an unexpected twist in regards to Gwen that helps us, retroactively, explain A LITTLE of that earlier behavior I bashed. But the ending didn’t feel airtight. And it needs to be airtight in a movie like this.
Close to a “worth the read” but not quite there.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A common piece of advice you hear in screenwriting is to KEEP YOUR SCRIPT MOVING. What does that mean, though, exactly? Here’s a good example of it. We have this fun cold open where Kris steals a security guard’s info in order to break into the company he works for. Now, normally, after a big fun scene like this, the writer will slow down. He’ll cash in on the credit he earned from that fun scene to make you slug through a few character intros or setup scenes. But notice how Quinones doesn’t do that. He keeps the momentum going…
