Hobbs & Shaw and the John Wick films: nonsense plots – Why does Wick work?

Hobbs & Shaw – Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham – full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I saw Hobbs & Shaw tonight. The spin-off movie from the Fast & Furious franchise.

Now, everyone’s tastes are different and this is only my own personal view and, anyway, what on earth do I know about making multi-million dollar mega-movies? But…

What a load of old rubbish.

It’s technically very proficient, there’s a staggering amount of work put into it and it looks like all the money (an alleged $200 million) is up there on screen and I can see why it is making a lot of money at the US box office… but what a load of old cobblers.

I don’t necessarily object to scripts that are utter nonsense.

Keanu Reeves starred as John Wick – cobblers but compulsive

The storylines for all three of the John Wick movies are similarly a right load of old cobblers. But all three (especially the third, which allegedly cost only $75 million) are tremendously enjoyable. Whereas Hobbs & Shaw was not; it was like The Blues Brothers, where you just watched lots happening and the budget spiral on screen. (It cost around $30 million in 1980.)

But I don’t think the plot of Hobbs & Shaw (though nonsense) was the main problem.

It is what I like to think of as the Batman & Robin problem.

The first Batman movie franchise was brought down by Batman & Robin, directed by the usually fairly dependable Joel Schumacher.

The trouble with Batman & Robin was that there was a lot happening. 

Which is fine.

But a lot of the action scenes involved special visual effects, which meant that there was no way to effectively have an establishing shot or wide shot of the action… because the action was actually NOT happening – it was a series of abstract action shots.

There was not really any easy way round that because of the use of post-production effects.

With Hobbs & Shaw there was a similar problem, though it looked like a lot of the effects were physical not visual effects.

Lots of quick-cutting to make it all feel frantic and exciting for the video-game-playing, post-MTV generation. But they were abstract, fast-moving action shots so, deep-down, the viewer (I, at least) was distanced rather than drawn into the action sequences.

To confuse matters, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (both former stuntmen) co-directed the first John Wick movie. Stahelski, solo, directed the second and third John Wick movies and Leitch went on to direct Hobbs & Shaw.

But back to audiences being psychologically involved in action sequences…

My favourite film is probably still The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s western set in 1913 about “nine men who came too late and stayed too long” – a movie which you can maybe only fully appreciate once you are over a certain age.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch – “If they move, kill ‘em!”

A UK director once pointed out to me something I had never noticed about Sam Peckinpah films and which certainly holds true for The Wild Bunch.

The director pointed out to me that Peckinpah almost always uses a wide shot at the very beginning of (not just) action sequences.

Having established that – having put into the audience’s brain the exact location of the characters in relation to each other and in relation to the location of the scene – he could do whatever he wanted including the Big Subliminally-Audience-Alienating No-No of continually ‘crossing the line’.

Because your brain knew the layout of the location and the characters, it didn’t matter if he crossed the line. He could do anything, because you ‘believed’ in the reality of the scene.

The trouble with the action in Batman and Robin and in Hobbs & Shaw, to my mind, is that – certainly in the fight and battle scenes I saw tonight – you are just watching movement within the individual shots. It’s movie-movie action aplenty and your eyes may be stimulated by the movements, but your brain is not anchored in what it feels to be a real scene.

In the John Wick films, the geography of the action scenes is much clearer and therefore the brain believes it is within the action not just objectively watching the action.

My point is that the plots of the John Wick movies and Hobbs & Shaw are all bollocks. But, because my willing suspension of disbelief was deployed in the John Wick movies but only my eyes were deployed in Hobbs & Shaw, I came out of the latter saying to someone: “What a load of old rubbish”.

I came out of John Wick 3 saying: “That was a load of old rubbish, but it was SO enjoyable.”

On the other hand, it could just be me writing a load of old rubbish in this blog.  

Everyone’s tastes are different and this is only my personal view and what on earth do I know about making multi-million dollar mega-movies?

Bugger all.

That’s it.

 

How to write the perfect film script: “Die Hard” meets Pixar animated feature “The Incredibles”

This morning, someone asked me about scriptwrtiting. He asked:

“Am I correct in assuming that boy loses girl three quarters of the way though almost every movie?”

This sounds like one of those formulae I don’t believe from one of those people who charge $800 for seminars in which they say Casablanca is the perfect way to write a script – in which case, the perfect way to write a script is to not know the ending while you’re shooting, have a cast of completely flummoxed actors and to write the script virtually day-by-day-by-night as shooting progresses. I have also heard Alien held up as a perfect piece of movie-making and, having met several crew members, I can tell you shooting on that film was an unhappy utter nightmare. So creating a nightmare situation for cast and crew would be the best way to make a film… Not.

The classic story, allegedly, is a ‘three act’ screenplay and the classic story is “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl”, but I think those three stages can happen anywhere you feel like in percentage terms.

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two rules of thumb. One is something I was told ages ago…

In the standard US TV movie, the entire basis of the plot and all the central characters at the heart of that plot are introduced in the first three minutes.

The best example I’ve ever seen of this is actually the first Die Hard big-screen movie in which, by the end of the opening credits – before the movie even starts properly – you know that Bruce Willis is a New York cop who has come to LA to see his ex-wife whom he still has affection for and who works for a Japanese multinational company in a large building, it is Christmas and there is a party in the building and (if my memory serves me) you are also introduced to the lead villain who has a team of baddies heading towards the building. All this before the opening credits end. It is a brilliant piece of scriptwriting.

It is done very efficiently by Bruce Willis’ apparently insignificant chit-chat with a taxi driver (whose character also runs through the movie) and by simple intercutting.

Last night, I accidentally saw the beginning of the Pixar animated movie The Incredibles and the central characters, situation and tone of the movie are, just like Die Hard, introduced clearly and concisely before the opening credits. I was interrupted by a phone call so never saw the rest of the movie, but I could tell I wanted to know more and to see more. I was hooked at the very start of the film, which is a big thing…

Because the second movie structure rule-of-thumb is that there has to be a ‘hook’ at the very beginning. If there isn’t a hook at the start of a film, I am never involved either emotionally or intellectually.

Setting up the atmosphere/tone at the start sounds good but doesn’t work.

You have to set up the atmosphere/tone but ALSO introduce the central characters and situation very quickly and succinctly. Another great example of this is the opening of my favourite film The Wild Bunch – everything is set up during the opening credits with dramatic music which sets the atmosphere/tone – you are shown the central characters, the bounty hunters waiting, the start of the opening bank robbery, the physical set-up for an upcoming massacre of the innocents… it is a giant hook of expectation built-up by great music… and even the director’s movie-making philosophy is established.

As the final credit DIRECTED BY SAM PECKINPAH appears on screen, William Holden barks out: “If they move… kill ’em!”

To my mind, the best films and TV episodes and the best novels have this structure… They start with an unresolved problem and end with the resolution of that problem; the plot is the unravelling of the problem and, during the story, you cannot yourself see how it can possibly be resolved so you have to keep watching to find out.

In the case of Die Hard, the unresolved problem is actually that the central character’s marriage has fallen apart plus there is going to be an attack on the skyscraper in which the ex-wife is working/partying. Along the way, bit by bit, there are other little hooks, each of which have to be straightened out. A couple of them are when the wife’s identity is revealed to the ‘terrorists’ and another the point at which the Bruce Willis character (armed) comes face-to-face with the lead ‘terrorist’ (unarmed) who pretends to be a hostage. So the hook running through the movie is Can he save his wife? and Can he save his marriage? And, along the way, there are a succession of little hooks.

I think the best example of this structure of constant hooks throughout a narrative is surprisingly Scots comedian Janey Godley‘s terrifying autobiography Handstands in the Dark – an emotional rollercoaster which makes the Himalayas look like goose bumps – I edited the book but did not write it (she wrote it) and I was therefore the first to be emotionally traumatised by reading it.

At the very beginning, even on the first page, there is a hook; I defy anyone who reads the closing paragraphs of the first chapter not to read the second chapter. And this happens throughout the book. She constantly tells the reader not-quite-enough facts to be satisfied. They have to read on a little more to find the resolution of each particular hook and, by the time they understand what is going on and/or are satisfied with the resolution of that problem, another hook has been set up. The book is also full of page-turning “Jesus fucking Christ almighty!” moments. Thunderbolts come out of the blue without any warning at all. And she intercuts multiple narrative strands throughout – this was nothing to do with me; she did it. It is an extraordinary narrative.

It reminded me, oddly, of Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien separates the central characters, then intercuts between the narrative strands, leaving the story strands dangling so you have to keep reading to find out what happened. Janey doesn’t have separate plot strands in that sense, but she intercuts her narrative. And the ending simultaneously is the biggest cliff-hanger since the climax of  the original Italian Job and also satisfyingly emotionally rounded-off. A neat trick she pulled there.

So my three golden rules for writing a film script (the third one echoes the late Malcolm Hardee‘s Third Golden Rule of Comedy) are:

1) explain the set-up and central characters in the first three minutes

2) structure the narrative with constant unresolved hooks

3) if all else fails, clothes off and knob out!

I should, perhaps, point out I never read any part of the Killer Bitch script until after shooting had finished and have still never actually read the full script…!