Script Review - Hitman (Part 1)

** WARNING – THIS IS A TOTAL, WANTON, UNINHIBITED, AND UNAPOLOGETIC, SPOILER-FILLED SCRIPT REVIEW **

Okay, I have an undated 127-page draft from Skip Woods, author of Swordfish, a movie that came out way back in 2001 and received a spirited lynching from the critics. In fact, Mr. Woods’ script was singled-out in the vast majority of reviews. Ebert called it “the result of a nasty explosion down at the Plot Works. It's skillfully mounted and fitfully intriguing, but weaves such a tangled web that at the end I defy anyone in the audience to explain the exact loyalties and motives of the leading characters.” The Los Angeles Times said, “Whatever interest the film creates is squandered via the smug, showy amorality that runs through it.” Rolling Stones - “the sleazy script by Skip Woods… slimes the actors.” The Los Angeles Daily - “This is the definition of empty (and empty-headed) entertainment, willing to stoop to any level to goose a weary and jaded audience.” Newsday - “By the seventh explosion, you can't help wondering whether all this flashy stuff amounts to more of a smokescreen shielding a lack of spine or soul.” And finally, Philadelphia Daily News - “Oops, I think one of the flying bodies belonged to a screenwriter, the one who was meant to supply clever dialogue and plausibility.”

Ouch.


Swordfish had a moderate showing at the box office, and I suspect, all things considered, the studio just barely broke even if that. (The movie is long removed from public consciousness. The only aspect about that film that people remember or talk about is the fact that you got to see Halle Berry’s breasts in a moment so pointless and gratuitous it was embarrassing.) Since the film’s release, everyone seemingly moved on except Skip – a good warning to screenwriters – you're never more than one script away from a career-stalling disaster. I’m not sure what happened to Skip. It’s been about 7 or 8 years. Either the industry shied away from him or he shied away from the industry OR he had a lot of starts and stops but wasn’t able to close a deal. And now he’s landed a nice gig with a franchise-starter, which adapts a popular video game and I’m sure he hopes will put him back on top.

I think this is the context through which we’d have to view this script, because this is really about how to recover when you get publicly shot down for a movie you wrote.


Two points:

1 – A lambasting by the critics changes nothing. You have to remain faithfully devoted to mastering the craft to the very end, always broadening your horizons, which means studying the craft, writing endlessly, giving and receiving feedback weekly, if not daily.

2 – You have to make sure your next script doesn’t repeat those same mistakes. You have to prove that you are not, in fact, what they say you are and illustrate very clear evidence to the contrary, as well as a supreme mastery of craft.

And now we come to a consideration of Hitman.


FORMAT

In a nutshell - the look of the script smacks of desperation. Skip manipulated almost everything to keep the page count down. Instead of 12 pt. Courier font, we have 11 pt. Courier font. The lines have been squeezed together so much so that the tops of some letters actually touch the bottoms of other letters. He manipulated the margins of the dialogue, too, so that it’s well over four inches wide, which is very troubling. Dialogue is usually 3 inches wide. (What’s your deal Mystery Man? Who do you think you are? The Format Police?) Hey, look, format was designed this way so that one page would equal one minute of screentime. When you’ve manipulated font size and spacing and margins of dialogue, this means that scenes, especially those with a lot of talk, will take up more screentime than page count. If formatted properly, this script would be pushing 160 pages, maybe longer.

If you find yourself manipulating font size and margins in order to squeeze it all in and keep the page count down, the problem is not the format. The problem is you.

(Note: picture above is NOT worth 1,000 words.)

Manipulated format gives the impression that the writer still hasn’t gotten a handle on the craft of screenwriting, that he/she is overeager to impress while not entirely confident in his/her skills, and that the emphasis in the script may very well be on all the wrong elements, like too much dialogue or how brilliant one can write action lines. A lot of aspiring screenwriters do this. They’ll try so hard to impress through beautifully written action lines that show how intelligent & insightful the writer can be or how he/she can poetically capture the slightest gestures of characters. Well, the emphasis is all wrong. The emphasis in a scene should be WHAT happens and HOW does it happen. Your brilliance and style should shine through action and character, not prosy, novel-like action paragraphs. That's very weak screenwriting.

And in this case, we have action lines that are ridiculously overwritten and scenes with absurd amounts of dialogue. In my running notes, I had “Pg 75 – Good God, look at all that talk…” “Pg 109 – WAY too much dialogue and exposition that comes too late into the story...” “Pg 119 – RIDICULOUS amount of dialogue.”


Not only that, for a guy who has an image of writing hip, contemporary action films, it’s embarrassing to see that he has no clue as to how a screenplay ought to function. Between the scenes, he has CUT TOs and FADE TO BLACKs, which we don’t write anymore. How can you be hip when you’re using outdated techniques from like, the 1960s? The action lines are filled with camera angles, “we see,” “we hear,” “CU” (for close-ups), “SUPERIMPOSE TITLE CARDs (when only SUPER is necessary), and worst of all, we have a countless number of overwritten unfilmmables in the action lines. For example:

“BELOW, another camouflaged and masked soldier, holding a sat-phone moves through the compound. These men belong to the most elite of the Russian Special forces, Spetsgruppa Vympel.

Believed to be dismantled under Gorbachev due to their legendary cruelty and predilection for blood-letting, the Vympel’s were in fact simply reorganized. A military sledgehammer for the new KGB.

The other Vympel walks toward the remnants of an old apartment building.”

That middle paragraph? Unfilmmable and unnecessary. Cut it. If it was truly essential to know their backstory, that would have to come out somewhere in the dialogue. If the production needed details about Spetsgruppa Vympel, they can easily look it up.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking and I’ll ask the question for you – why does format matter if Skip’s script was accepted and produced?

Easy - this was an assignment, and they had to accept it. Make no mistake, this spec was in need of a rewrite; however, almost everything in this business boils down to money. And I suspect they simply didn’t want to pay the money to hire another writer to fix the script, and this, my friends, is how bad movies get made. Yet, sometimes, by a miracle, they turn out okay.

When this film gets released on DVD, I may do a script-to-screen study because I really am curious to see how the badly manipulated format compares to the finished film.

Next: Story & Character.