Shane Black's career has had
a fascinating, meteoric rise and fall (and perhaps to rise again). The
screenwriter hit the big time when his breakthrough screenplay for Lethal Weapon (1987) sold for $250,000.
This kick-started a wildly popular action film franchise. He soon hit rock
bottom with the heavily re-written (by others) modest hit, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), the script of his which sold for a
staggering $4 million). And yet, even his weaker efforts still contain decent
action sequences and playful banter between characters. What seemed to be
missing in Black's later films was depth and characterization – elements that
made his screenplays distinctive. Perhaps this was as a result of meddling and
script revisions at the hands of others. For Black, screenwriting came easy: “The fact that there were so few rules associated with it,
so few actual structural maxims … you can just do what you want. So I played
around and it was fun. I would just type to keep myself entertained. It turned
out people liked that. They felt it represented an interesting way to go, but
for me it was truly just typing to keep myself entertained.”
However, studio executives
were only interested in using Black to write formulaic drivel. Determined to
make it, he wrote Lethal Weapon. The
script was a blast of fresh air and ended up being made into a big budget
action film starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. This kind of thing almost
never happens in Hollywood and it’s a testimony to Black’s skill as a
screenwriter that he achieved this kind of success so early on in his career. Lethal Weapon grossed over a $100
million. In the best tradition of Hollywood, money talks and so in 1990, Black
was paid $1.75 million (an unheard of amount at the time) for The Last Boy Scout script. The next year
it was made into a 1991 action movie starring Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans and
directed by the late Tony Scott.
The film starts off
literally with a bang as a pro-football player (a pre-infomerical Billy Blanks)
pulls out a handgun right in the middle of a play and shoots three opposing
players in his way to getting a touchdown before killing himself. Joe
Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) is a private detective hired by his best friend
(Bruce McGill) to protect a stripper named Cory (Halle Berry in an early role).
The best friend is subsequently blown up in a car and the stripper gunned down
by thugs. Her washed-up, football-playing boyfriend (Damon Wayans) hooks up
with Joe to get some answers and some much needed payback.
"I had this period
where I didn't think I was any good at anything and fought desperately to stay
afloat," Black said in an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine. And with that feeling in mind,
Black wrote a movie that pushes the world-weary detective stereotype to then
new, surreal levels. Willis' performance and Black's screenplay combine to
produce a portrait of a guy who is so down and out that our first glimpse is a
shot of him passed out in his own car while being harassed by snotty neighborhood
kids with a dead squirrel. When we meet him he has a pretty simple outlook on
life – a mantra, if you will, to start each day: “Nobody likes you. Everybody
hates you. You’re gonna lose. Smile you fuck.” Willis, who has made a career out
of playing world-weary tough guys, nails the defeated vibe that sticks to Joe
like stink on dog poo. Joe’s actually a very disillusioned good guy, an
ex-Secret Service agent who saved the President’s life once but got fired after
he punched out a senator (Chelcie Ross) with a kinky streak. Throughout the
movie, Willis delivers deadpanned one-liners while constantly getting the crap
kicked out him. As a result, you can't help but root for him as he and Wayans
send the baddies to their well-deserved violent deaths.
Willis plays a classic
burn-out, sporting the traditional slovenly appearance of a down-on-his-luck
P.I. complete with unshaven look and rumpled clothes that he slept in. And
that’s the best he looks, from that point on it’s all downhill as his face
takes on cuts and lacerations accrued from fighting numerous bad guys. Joe
actually uses his disheveled appearance to his advantage, like when a random
baddie takes him into an alleyway to kill him. Joe buys time by cracking jokes
about the flunkie’s wife and then, when the guy lets his guard down, stabs him
in the throat with broken bottle. The guy gurgles, “You bastard,” to which Joe
curtly replies, “And then some.” Willis was born to spout Black’s dialogue.
He’s the master of sarcastic comebacks and gets some real doozies in The Last Boy Scout. At one point, Jimmy
chides him, “You read much?” Joe replies, “My subscription to Juggs magazine just ran out.”
Jimmy is also at an
emotional cul-de-sac of sorts – popping pills to stave off chronic pain from
football injuries he picked up as a player. Like Joe, he’s been disgraced from
his former profession, kicked out of the league for gambling. He now spends
time feeling sorry for himself by cultivating a drinking problem and nailing
anything in a skirt despite having a super-hot stripper girlfriend played by Halle
Berry (only in the movies!). Like Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, Jimmy lost his family to tragedy and it taints his
entire worldview. Life means nothing and solving his girlfriend’s murder is the
only thing he has left. Wayans shows that he’s more than just a goofy funnyman
in a scene where he tells Joe how he got kicked out of football. It is an angry
tirade tinged with hurt and bitter resentment as he was basically chewed up and
spit out by an uncaring organization. His speech touches upon the harsh realties
of professional sports.
Scott populates his film
with a fine collection of character actors, chief among them Noble Willingham
as uber rich football team owner Sheldon Marcone and stand-up comedian Taylor Negron cast wonderfully against type as one of Black’s trademark polite,
well-spoken sociopaths (see also Lethal
Weapon’s Mr. Joshua and The Long Kiss
Goodnight’s Timothy). Marcone is also a repeating motif in Black’s scripts.
He’s an old, privileged white man who is greedy and corrupt. Think of the
money-laundering retired general in Lethal
Weapon and the war-mongering CIA boss in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Black clearly sees these men as the source
of real evil in the world, pulling the strings that will result in death and
destruction in the name of money. In all three films, the protagonists face insurmountable
odds to do what is right regardless of the danger or risk to their own
well-being.
Like most buddy action
movies, the relationship between Joe and Jimmy starts off with plenty of
friction as the quarterback resents the private investigator watching over his
girlfriend because that’s his job. They trade a few insults and then decide to
team up when she’s killed. Black has fun playing around with the dynamic
between two guys who basically hate each other but are thrown together due to
extraordinary circumstances. At one point, Jimmy cracks a joke to lighten the
mood between them only to be rebuffed by Joe. Jimmy tells him, “I’m just trying
to break the ice,” to which Joe replies, “I like ice. Leave it the fuck alone.”
There are all kinds of snappy banter between them as Wayans tones down his
trademark goofy shtick and more or less plays straight man to Willis’ deadpan
humor.
Unlike a lot of buddy action
movies, Black allows for the occasional lull, like the moment where Jimmy looks
at a photograph of him and Cory and you can see on his face how upset he is by
her death now that he has a moment to reflect on it. No words are said, Wayans’
face says it all. Joe and Jimmy represent the last bastion of decency in a
world that is corrupt and morally bankrupt, where best friends double cross
each other, wealthy businessmen are blackmailed, and wives cheat on their
husbands. The deeper our two heroes go into investigating Cory’s murder the
more corruption they uncover.
The aforementioned alleyway
sequence and Cory’s death are vintage Tony Scott moments with his trademark
look: smoke, neon and rainy streets at night. Think of it as the director’s
version of a neo-noir. He is equally adept at action sequences as he is with
showdown set pieces, like the scene where a henchman repeatedly offers Joe a
cigarette only to punch it out of his mouth. Joe has been captured and is
unarmed and outnumbered but he still has the balls to threaten to kill the guy
if he hits him one more time. There is palpable tension as we wait for Joe to
follow through on his threat (or be killed), which he does with brutal
swiftness. It is reminiscent of the famous showdown between Christopher Walken
and Dennis Hopper in True Romance (1993)
where a tense scene could erupt in violence at any moment.
Successful screenwriter
Shane Black made headlines in 1989 when he sold his spec screenplay (written
without a contract from a studio or a producer) for The Last Boy Scout to the David Geffen Co. for an unprecedented
$1.75 million. He had wisely taken advantage of the boom of independent
production companies that sprouted up in the late 1980s looking for big budget
action scripts. It must’ve come as validation of his abilities after what he
had been through.
After his meteoric rise with
the success of the script he had written for Lethal Weapon, a sequel was inevitable. The studio gave Black first
crack at it. Something had happened to the writer after enjoying a taste of
notoriety and his first draft was even darker than what he had written for the
first Lethal Weapon. For starters, he
proceeded to kill off Mel Gibson’s character. Not surprisingly, the studio
didn’t want to go that route and Black quit the project. Then, he lost the
desire to write. A family illness coupled with the break-up of a long-term
relationship rocked his already shaky confidence. For the next two years he did
no writing and instead lived in fear of the next project and failing. Out of
this dark period in his life came the script for The Last Boy Scout, which he wrote in five months.
For the script, Black drew
on such influences as hard-boiled crime fiction by the likes of Raymond
Chandler and Ross McDonald because they wrote about “personal integrity,
morality, conflict, dealing with insanity, dealing with pain and death.” He
wanted to write a modern private investigator story set in Los Angeles. He
decided to set his story with the sleazy side of professional football as the
backdrop because it matched up well with his take on a Chandleresque private
investigator story. For Black, football “combines the spirit of the American
hero with the spirit of American greed.” After finishing the script, he didn’t
think it would sell because “it was weird” and “too rough for most people. It’s
not a commercial formula; it’s a very raunchy, down and dirty detective film.”
Originally, director Tony
Scott had a war movie taking place in Afghanistan set up as his follow-up to the
Tom Cruise racing car movie Days of
Thunder (1990). However, the script didn’t come together and he was given The Last Boy Scout. He liked it so much
that he agreed to do it. Not much has come out of what went down during filming
but what little has suggests a contentious shoot. With titanic egos like
producer Joel Silver, movie star Bruce Willis and Tony Scott, they were bound
to clash and they did as Scott later admitted, “I got caught a little bit
between Bruce and Joel Silver … I was pushed in terms of the cast and in terms
of how I was shooting it.” He also felt that Black’s script “was better than
the final movie.” Of the experience, all Silver would say was that it was “one
of the three worst experiences in my life.”
Not
surprisingly, The Last Boy Scout
received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and
called it “a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart,
utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. How is the critic to
respond? To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a
skillful and well-crafted movie.” Entertainment
Weekly gave it a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Willis’
performance: “Like Bogart, he plugs you right into his
cynicism — then, in the middle of the most untenable situation (say, when a
grinning thug keeps socking him in the jaw instead of lighting his cigarette),
he'll drop a soft-voiced, grace-under-pressure remark that detonates like a
neutron bomb,” and called the film “a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I've
seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren't this much fun.”
However,
in his review for The New York Times,
Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a
prize for demolishing a building in record time.” The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Wilmington called it “a dirty-mouth
Walter Mitty fantasy, product of an age where naiveté and cynicism are locked
in promiscuous embrace. It's also macho daydreaming with a vengeance.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized the film’s view of women:
“In this cast of dumbly conceived archetypes, the worst is Willis's teenage
daughter (Danielle Harris). She doesn't talk just dirty. Large sods of earth
roll from her tongue. In Scout, if a
woman isn't a slut or a bimbo, she's a bitch.”
The Last Boy Scout performed fairly well at the box office and has since enjoyed a second
life on video and television (thank you, TBS). Black went on to get paid more
than $1 million for his rewrites on The
Last Action Hero (1993), a criminally underrated romp that is the
granddaddy of self-reflexive action movies. This movie was crucified by critics
and did not perform as well at the box office as expected but this did not
tarnish Black’s reputation either. However, he disappeared from movies for a
few years before coming back with a vengeance with the quirky private detective
movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and
is currently working on Iron Man 3
(2013). The Last Boy Scout is a lean,
mean guilty pleasure with a misanthropic streak that is uncompromisingly un-PC
in attitude. This is further reinforced by its rather poor view of women. They
are either liars and cheats (Joe’s wife), whores (Cory), or foul-mouthed brats
(Joe’s daughter). Joe takes it all grimly in stride because hey, he’s already
hit rock bottom. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything, including himself. Action
films don't get any nastier than this one.
SOURCES
Greenberg, James. “Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Millionaire.” Los Angeles Magazine. August 19,
1990.
The Last Boy Scout Production Notes. 1991.
“Tony Scott on Tony Scott.” Empire.
Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Tony
Scott’s Project.” The New York Times. July 12, 1991.
