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Black List Script #9: The Gunslinger by John Hlavin

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “A tough ex-Texas Ranger has unfinished business with the Mexican gangsters who tortured his brother to death, and when they kidnap his brother’s young son, he comes after them with everything he has got.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Texas Ranger PHIL ELCO (50s) is called to the scene of a murder. The victim: fellow Ranger Danny Hensley, who was tortured by drug dealers (who also kept him alive with medication so they could torture him longer). Phil calls Danny’s brother, Ranger SAM LEE HENSLEY (30s), who is shocked and upset. At the funeral, Sam Lee consoles Danny’s widow, DEBORAH. Sympathetically, Phil gives Sam Lee a tip from the DEA on the down-low: the house where Danny’s body was found is owned by a thug named BILLY FLIP. Strapped with guns, Sam Lee goes to a bar where Flip’s known to drink. He demands to know who killed his brother. Flip is reluctant to tell him until Sam Lee, a crack shot, shoots clean through the bartender’s security baseball bat while looking at him through the reflection flips glasses. Flip tells Sam Lee it was a man named DIEGO DELA, who frequents a whorehouse. Sam Lee pistol whips him for good measure, then heads out to find Diego. Sam Lee waits outside the house until the whores leave, then bursts in, guns blazing. He wants to know who Diego’s boss is, but when Diego refuses to tell him, Sam Lee murders him — along with most of his companions. Phil is rousted out of bed early the next morning by DEA agent STEVE KENNEDY (40s), who explains that one of Diego’s men was an informant who brought the DEA closer than ever to finding out who ran the Tarto drug cartel. Unhelpful, Phil tells Kennedy to prove Sam Lee’s involvement. Kennedy points out that Phil had access to the confidential DEA file that led Sam Lee to Flip, and then to Diego, but not even that convinces Phil to help Kennedy.

Seven years later, Sam Lee is released from prison. His old Ford Bronco waits for him, maintained and tuned by Phil, who now owns a gas and service station in town. After thanking Phil, Sam Lee goes to his isolated ranch house and starts working on repairs and security measures (including motion sensors and a panic room). One night, an attractive Mexican, ESTELLA, shows up on Sam Lee’s doorstep. She claims to be the father of Danny’s illegitimate child, who was kidnapped by a man named Emilio. She begs for help. Sam Lee refuses. He goes to Phil’s garage to see if Phil has an information about Emilio. Phil refuses to help him, fearing Sam Lee’s planning to kill again. Sam Lee explains the bit about Estella fathering Danny’s child, but Phil still won’t help. Sam Lee goes to the motel where Estella is staying and tells her to arrange a time and place to meet Emilio. Sam Lee will get her the $10,000 ransom. On the way to the Mexican bar where they’ve arranged to meet Emilio, Sam Lee meets up with Phil, who has dug up the information on Emilio: he’s known for kidnapping, he’s dangerous, and he always brings backup.

At the bar, EMILIO and his thugs hang around, keeping close watch over the kid, CARLITO. Sam Lee hands off the money, at which time Estella reveals she’s working with Emilio, who claimed he’d pay her half the ransom. Instead, Emilio kills her. They tie up Sam Lee and take him away. He goes quietly. In the basement of a Spanish hacienda, Sam Lee is tortured by FRANCISCO MORELES, the leader of the Tarto cartel. He claims to have protected Sam Lee during his prison sentence because one of the men Sam Lee killed was his nephew, so he wanted the pleasure of killing Sam Lee himself. He also tells a long story about how he got into the trade: he was a Mexican doctor making a low wage and working with inferior equipment. One night, a man came in with abdominal pain but refused to say what he had eaten. Because Moreles couldn’t care for him properly, the man died. When Moreles performed the autopsy, he learned the man had three condoms filled with heroin in his digestive tract. One had burst, but the other two were intact. Moreles took the intact condoms and changed careers. Moreles threatens Sam Lee with a deck of cards: if he cuts the deck and finds an ace of spades, he will kill Sam Lee. If not, he’ll just torture him. Moreles falls back on his medical training to torture without killing. He pulverizes Sam Lee’s shooting hand, detaches one of his corneas, and leaves Sam Lee to await further torture. Later, when somebody comes in to give him more medication, Sam Lee kills the man, takes his gun and all his medical syringes, and flees the seemingly empty hacienda.

He manages to get to Deborah’s house, begging for help (coincidentally, she’s a doctor). She wants to call an ambulance, but he refuses to let her. Sam Lee tells Deborah to call Phil, then passes out. When Phil arrives, Sam Lee has regained consciousness. He tells Sam Lee he knew it was an ambush but let it happen so he could be led to the man responsible for Danny’s death. Phil’s surprised to hear Moreles’s name — by this time, everyone knows who he is. Sam Lee asks for a favor, which Phil arranges: a sham funeral made real with proper paperwork. With everyone convinced he’s dead, Sam Lee can take some time to recuperate. He begs Deborah for help getting to Moreles. She’s reluctant to help — she doesn’t want Sam Lee to end up dead, too — but agrees when Sam Lee tells her about Danny’s kid. She takes Sam Lee out to practice shooting, but he has a hard time with his loss of depth perception and bad hand. When Deborah removes his cast, Sam Lee demands that she cut out the clotting areas that are making his hand swell.

Phil comes over to Deborah’s house. He subtly implies that Sam Lee should leave Deborah out of this. Sam Lee tells Phil it’s not over yet. That night, Sam Lee tries to test the grip of his bad hand. Deborah tells him he doesn’t need to do this — Moreles thinks he’s dead. Sam Lee reminds her about Carlito. Deborah tells Sam Lee she knew Danny was messing around and blames herself for pulling away when she found she couldn’t have kids. Sam Lee has a dream/memory of Danny getting involved in a hostage negotiation involving a child. Sam Lee sneaks into the scene and shoots Danny in the ass in order to get a clear shot at the perpetrator. Afterward, Danny yells at him for not allowing him to negotiate. Sam Lee tells Danny that when he dropped his gun (in order to gain some trust), all bets were off. The next morning, Phil helps Sam Lee rig his shoulder holsters so he can reach both guns even with his bad hand. He warns Phil about various traps he’s set around his ranch house and tells Phil to pick up Deborah and take her to the motel to wait it out. Deborah wakes up and finds a note from Sam Lee, telling her to go with Phil when he comes and giving her his bank account information just in case.

Sam Lee sets up a sniper perch on Moreles’s hacienda. He waits, staking out the place until the right moment. When the time is right, he wedges a stick on his Bronco’s accelerator and aims it at the hacienda. With the men distracted, Sam Lee takes most of them out from his sniper perch. Then, he moves in closer, where he kills the remaining people and gets to Carlito. Sam Lee promises Carlito safety and asks if he wants to come with him. Carlito goes. Sam Lee spreads out a deck of cards, all aces of spades. Moreles and his top men return to the hacienda and find all their men dead and the aces. Moreles tells his men to call any available mercenaries and offer a reward — on Phil and Deborah.

Sam Lee brings Carlito to the ranch house. He prepares for what he knows is coming and shows Carlito the panic room. He tells Carlito to lock himself inside and wait until he hears the password. Phil picks up Deborah and takes her to the motel. He leaves her in the room and goes to the attached diner to get some coffee. Billy Flip works the grill. He sees Phil; Phil sees him and knows what to expect. He returns to the room, where Deborah’s showering, and insists they must leave immediately. Deborah doesn’t understand and won’t give up her shower. It’s a moot point, because it’s too late — Phil only has time to call Sam Lee and warn him before SUVs full of gangsters show up. Sam Lee rushes to the motel. A wild gunfight ensues. Phil manages to hold his own against the many thugs, but it’s not enough — he’s fatally wounded. Sam Lee shows up in time to take out the remaining men, including Billy Flip, whom he kills in cold blood.

Meanwhile, Moreles and his mean have been waiting outside Sam Lee’s ranch house for him to leave. When he does, they go in and find the safe room. Sam Lee drags Deborah back to the ranch house, where he’s set up a sniper perch. Sam Lee’s annoyed to find that Moreles and his men are already there. He tells Deborah to call the sheriff, but Deborah doesn’t have a cell phone. He sends her to go and get the sheriff and bring him back. When she leaves, Sam Lee starts sniping. Moreles tells his men to cut the power. Sam Lee starts firing blind. Moreles knows Sam Lee can’t see anything, or else he won’t be missing. Two of Moreles’s men find the sniper perch. It seems like Sam Lee’s done for — but as they take one of his guns, he comes at them with another, killing them both.

Moreles instructs his men to set a small C4 charge to blow the safe room door. It doesn’t exactly work — the door opens slightly, enough for one man to get a hand through, but Carlito stabs him with a paring knife. Annoyed, Moreles decides to go with a larger charge — if it kills Carlito, so be it. His men set up the charge. Sam Lee moves closer to the house. He manages to kill everyone but Moreles, who grabs the detonator and threatens Sam Lee. Since they’re all in such close quarters, they all die if Moreles detonates the charge. In response, Sam Lee gives Carlito the password. Carlito fiddling with the locks momentarily distracts Moreles, giving Sam Lee the opportunity to shoot Moreles’s detonating thumb. Then, he shoots Moreles in the head. Carlito comes clear of the safe room just as the sheriff’s department surrounds the ranch house. Sam Lee sends Carlito out, telling him to find a woman named Deborah, who will take care of him. Then, still in the house, he detonates the charge, blowing the house sky high.

Carlito is introduced to Deborah. The sheriff is fine with this, seeing as how they’re pseudo-kin. They figure the explosion of the house means Sam Lee is really dead — but he’s not. He watches Deborah and Carlito’s awkward introduction before walking unnoticed into the night.

Notes

Another year, another low-rent No Country for Old Men knockoff.

Like last year’s The Low Dweller, The Gunslinger aspires to be some sort of heady, thought-provoking rumination on violence. Also like The Low Dweller, it’s relentlessly violent but doesn’t provoke much thought on the subject. It knows the notes and not the music, so it features a leaden pace that lacks suspense and a lot of theoretically meaningful conversations that don’t mean much. It’s pretty much a stock revenge action flick that’s desperate to be more. I’m getting a little sick of scripts like that. Remember when friends and family would get killed, and the big hero would go down to the basement, come back with a dufflebag full of guns, and the next hour would be a maniacal yet eminently satisfying killing spree? Why does everything have to be so plodding and pseudo-thoughtful? It’s probably more frustrating because many of these scripts — The Low Dweller and The Gunslinger included — are not thoughtful. They simply plod along, as if the deliberate pace of molasses alone constitutes deeeeeep meaning.

One disadvantage of The Gunslinger is that we only get to know Sam Lee’s brother — the one he’s fighting to avenge, also known as the most important person in this story — through sometimes on-the-nose dialogue and artless flashbacks. None of this works particularly well, feeling more like writer John Hlavin is trying to write himself out of a corner than anything else. It’s too little, too late. It’s easy enough to buy into Sam Lee’s thirst for revenge, but it might have been nicer to get to know these characters before Danny dies. Not just Danny himself, but also Phil and Deborah. We get a few glimmers of what Phil was like before the seven-year jump in time, but what about the others? Were they always so depressing and lifeless? (I say this knowing full well that The Low Dweller actually does use the first act to introduce us to all the notable characters, then kills off the brother and lets us watch the way each character changes as a result of his death. And I didn’t like that, either. Maybe the solution is just a dufflebag full of guns.)

No, no. Get out of the parenthetical, dufflebag full of guns. We need you. I’m not going to sit here and pretend this script had any redeeming qualities. It’s the sort of fucking script where the big villain rattles off James Bond villain speeches the protagonist doesn’t need to know but the audience does, the sort of script where the big villain uses the blood-curdling menace of playing cards in order to threaten the protagonist, and even that truly terrifying display of thin plastic rectangles serves as little more than a moment to lazily call back to during one of Sam Lee’s cheesy action-movie badass moments. How in God’s name did this script get so dull? Why does it refuse to just be a dopey, mindless shoot-‘em-up? It’d be a hell of a lot more fun, and it’s already pretty well dopey and mindless. Just accept it and blow shit up instead of bringing in kids for treacly sentimental moments or focusing on long sequences of people driving around, looking depressed.

Really, the only positive thing I can say about this script is that it shows the Mexico I remember, the one sorely missing from Desperados, but it’s all too brief. This is not the world’s worst script, but it’s yet another example of a script that’s trying to be something it isn’t.

The Bottom Line

Because this bears such eerie similarities to the problems of The Low Dweller, the fix is exactly the same, so I’ll just quote what I wrote then:

There are two obvious but opposite ways to fix it: (1) embrace the fact that it’s an action movie by making it big, dumb, and overblown, or (2) take a step back, look at the way the story unfolds and what happens to the characters, figure out what you’re trying to say with the theme and the subtext, and rewrite it as a heady drama with a few intense, stomach-knotting action sequences. It depends on what [Hlavin] (or whoever produces it) wants the story to be. As it stands, [The Gunslinger] isn’t bad so much as an excruciating example of mediocrity masquerading as something more. Embrace the mediocrity and have fun with it, or work hard to make it great. That’s it.

Tags: action, Black List, Black List 2009, drama, genre confusion, John Hlavin, leaden, The Gunslinger, The Low Dweller, thriller

Posted by Stan on December 24, 2009 5:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Reviews | Digg It