Whooping Llama

I had to write this screenplay back in the fall for a class I took. It’s been sitting around on my thumb drive ever since, so I figured…what the heck, I’ll post the thing. So, for your reading enjoyment, I present to you One Last Time. It’s a western, with an honest-to-God, Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood-style anti-hero with a heart of gold, named after a Protestant theologian. There are guns, there are horses, there are prostitutes…and they’re all wrapped up in a handy little PDF file.

One Last Time (PDF, 77.8kb)

NOTE: The middle part is in treatment (as in, I just tell you what goes on without any dialogue or camera shots or anything) because Dr. Weiss said it could be…so there.

NOTE #2: If any Hollywood execs or enterprising indie filmmakers out there want to make this thing, lemme know.

The most memorable part of a movie is usually the big climactic scene towards the end. You know, where Jimmy Stewart’s neighbors pay off his debt to the old wheelchair-bound curmudgeon, or where Bogie gives his “if you don’t get on that plane” speech, or when the Nazis get their faces melted off because they opened the Ark of the Covenant. Well, if you go to see Jamie Foxx’s newest film The Kingdom (which also stars hometown girl Jennifer Garner), you’re going to witness one of the memorable events in the movie right after the trailers end.

Never before have I witnessed opening credits this stirring. For those of us who skipped the lectures on modern Middle Eastern history, these credits teach you everything you need to know about Saudi Arabia’s past in just under four minutes (at least, everything you need to know as far as the movie’s narrative is concerned). If there are awards for such things, I nominate the opening credits from The Kingdom for “best timeline in the history of the world.”

Then we get to the movie itself. Here’s the plot synopsis: an extremist Muslim organization (think mini-Al-Qaeda run by a wanna-be Bin Laden) detonates a couple bombs inside a Saudi housing compound largely inhabited by Westerners. FBI special agent Ronald Fluery (played by Foxx) assembles a crack team of investigators to find the murderous cell leader and stop him before more attacks occur. The catch: the U.S. State Department doesn’t want the FBI investigating the bombings for fear of damaging their delicate relations with the Saudi Royal Family…and the Saudi’s aren’t too keen either.

Pretty standard stuff, I have to admit. Still, The Kingdom isn’t one of those shoot-‘em-up-kill-all-the-bad-guys-ooh-rah movies. Although the film takes a wholly understandable “terrorism is bad” stance, the writer and director made sure to show the humanity of both sides of the conflict. The screenplay doesn’t allow the viewer to sympathize completely with the film’s terrorists, but at least these men are shown as real people with families and belief systems instead of cardboard cut-outs who are as dispensable as Dixie Cups at a frat party.

These sympathies climax at the end of the film, when a rather disturbing parallel is revealed (I won’t give it away; it’s the cornerstone of the movie’s message). The resulting product is one that will engender a sense of patriotism, only to dash it all in the next scene. For all its blood, gore, and explosions, The Kingdom is an action movie with a heart. radiating an emotional complexity not often found in the genre. It’s as schizophrenic as Middle Eastern politics, and probably won’t be named the feel-good movie of the year, but it’ll definitely make you think.

And in this day and time, that’s certainly not a bad thing, is it?