Genre: Thriller
Premise: A hitman wakes up to find out he’s been transformed into a woman and vows revenge on the doctor who did it to him.
About: Today’s script comes from Walter Hill, the writer of Alien, The Warriors, 48 Hours, and Alien 3. Hill’s career of late has slowed down, though he did direct a Stallone movie four years ago called “Bullet to the Head.” For his most recent screenplay, however, you’ll have to look back to 2002, when he wrote Undisputed, starring Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames. Tomboy will star Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hill will direct from his own script.
Writer: Walter Hill
Details: 109 pages
It always baffles me how once great writers can disappear into obscurity. I mean, does talent disappear one day? Do you become a worse writer as you get older?
I have a theory on this. Once you prove yourself to Hollywood, the checks and balances go away. And the checks and balances are what kept you honest in the first place. I get it. Nobody wants notes back on their screenplay. Nobody wants to be told: “This section isn’t working.” But when you address a complaint like that, you usually end up making the screenplay better.
Once you’re on top, you can tell people who give you notes to fuck off. Complicating matters is your belief that you’re better now, that with time you have a better understanding of what you’re doing. So it makes sense, in your mind, why you’re telling someone to fuck off. You know better than them.
This leads to a lethargy in the way you approach your craft. Since you’re smarter, you rationalize, you don’t have to work as hard. And eventually that disposition poisons you, drip drip dripping until you’re writing really basic shit that isn’t pushing the envelope on any level.
The thing is, Tomboy isn’t that. If anything, it’s one of the most ambitious screenplays I’ve read all year. The rules are thrown out the window. So does that make this a return to form for Walter Hill? Let’s find out.
50-something Dr. Rachel Kaye, or “The Doctor,” as she will be known, is being kept in a psychiatric hospital for reasons unknown. A couple of doctors have come to interview her to try and comprehend what she’s done. And what she’s done will be the subject of this story.
Meanwhile, we’re listening to a voice over from somebody named “Tomboy.” Tomboy is a guy named Frank Kitchen. Frank is a hitman. He’s very professional. Does his job and never asks questions.
Well, maybe he should’ve asked one here. Frank kills a guy named Sebastian Kaye, another low-life who doesn’t know how to pay up. No big whup, right?
Except a few months later, Frank is flown into the big city to do a new job from someone named Honest John, a guy he’s worked with before. Honest John wants Frank to take someone out, and that’s the plan until Frank is assaulted in his hotel room, knocked out, and wakes up… as a woman.
Through a little investigation, Frank (now “Tomboy”), learns that The Doctor did this to him because the man he killed, Sebastian, was The Doctor’s brother. Killing Frank seemed “so last year.” So instead, she decided to make him suffer by turning him into a chick.
While that’s going on, we keep jumping back to the psyche ward interrogation, where the guys interviewing The Doctor are convinced she’s making this up, specifically Frank.
So the story is, I guess, two-fold. On one end, Tomboy’s trying to get revenge. On the other, the doctors are trying to figure out if Rachel Kaye is lying to them. In the interim, we’re left to wonder, why does any of this matter?
Tomboy is like a strange cross between Silence of the Lambs (with The Doctor clearly filling in for the Hannibal role) and The Usual Suspects (with Frank taking on the Kayser Soze moniker?). Unfortunately, it doesn’t create the dramatic tension of either, and that’s because its structure is way too funky.
Tomboy is telling its story from two different voice over points of view. One is The Doctor, the other Tomboy. This is such a confusing device that it takes a good 60 pages to get used to, especially since we bounce back and forth between them so liberally. And they’re not even being done in a uniform way. In one instance, a character is being interviewed, in the other, we’re getting a straight disembodied voice over. It’s odd.
And if it had worked, I’d be fine with it. But even once you get used to it, you’re not sure why it’s being used. I have no idea why we’re talking to this doctor in the first place. We learn nothing from her that we couldn’t have learned from Tomboy, and in most cases, her voice over disrupted a more dramatically interesting reveal.
For example, Tomboy is trying to figure out who’s done this to him and why. That’s an interesting mystery. Had we only seen this through Frank’s eyes, it could’ve been a good film. Except 30 pages in, in one of The Doctor’s voice overs, she tells us who Frank is, who he killed, and why she did this to him. So the mystery is already solved.
It was at that point that I asked myself, “Why am I still watching this movie?” Everything’s already been laid on the table. What is there left, dramatically, to stay invested? For example, in Silence of the Lambs, we want to see if Clarice is going to save the kidnapped woman! That’s why we keep reading. With The Usual Suspects, we want to find out what happened that night and who Kayser Soze is.
After awhile, I assumed that the reason we were still watching was to see Tomboy get revenge. But we know he doesn’t get revenge because The Doctor is fine. And, to be honest, I don’t care if he does get revenge or not. This doctor turned him into a woman for killing his brother. Sounds like everyone’s at fault here. What do I gain from seeing bad people avenge bad people?
The biggest problem with Tomboy is it complicates the shit out of its presentation, and to what end? If you’re going to make us work like dogs to understand what’s happening, there has to be the fucking payoff of the century at the end. And I can tell you right now without spoiling anything, this payoff wouldn’t have been satisfactory in a Goosebumps movie.
I guess I’m stumped. What’s the reasoning behind making this script so confusing? You could’ve had a cool flick if a guy wakes up, having been turned into a woman, and he/she tries to figure out who did this to him and why. To have another character giving us the answers in real-time along the way, killing the one dramatic element you had going for you (the mystery) was baffling to say the least.
So why is it getting made? It’s got two killer female roles and female roles are hot right now. I wish those roles mattered to the story more. But hey, I guess you can’t have everything.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes in trying to be too clever, we overcomplicate things, turning what could’ve been a solid screenplay into something messy and confusing. Make sure you have a reason for doing something differently. Don’t just do it because it’s different.
