K-SCORE: 15
Director: Alex Kurtzman
Writer: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Jon Spaights, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet
Starring: Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Russell Crowe
Spoiler Level: Major, it's the whole plot. Also who careS?
“Tom Cruise kills Jenny with whiplash, hypoxia, and altitude sickness”
Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
We open. Crusaders bury a red rock in tombs beneath what will become the London subway system. Cut to: the past, further back. Ancient Egypt. A sexy twenty-something princess spars with a warrior, then makes a pact with Set, in this universe the Egyptian God of Death (not Osiris) by which she has to kill her father, a baby, and a man she seduced all with an impractical dagger. She’s stopped mid-coitus and wrapped in toilet paper before being shoved into a sarcophagus and dropped in a hole “far from Egypt.”
Cut to: modern day Iraq. Tom Cruise and that guy from The New Girl argue about whether to engage Islamic militants outside a desert village. Tom recklessly cuts their canteens and rides in. Nick, not to be confused with Tom Cruise’s character Nick, calls in an airstrike before falling in a hole. Cut to: Islam is dead. All white people are alive and the black military commander orders Tom, Nick, and that girl from Forrest Gump to repel into the hole. Nick’s bitten by a spider. Tom shoots a chain to bring up Sexy Twenty-Something Princess’s sarcophagus on complicated winch machinery.
“ At this point, all characters are assuredly dead.”
Cut to, an eerily quiet military transport jet. Nick, in a cursed trance, stabs black military commander in the chest. His soldiers turn their weapons on Nick. Tom Cruise, playing a treasure hunter, easily disarms the marines. Trained pilots fly into a flock of birds inexplicably flying in a swarm at thirty-thousand feet. The jet goes down. Tom Cruise kills Jenny with whiplash, hypoxia, and altitude sickness by forcing her into a parachute instead of giving her the choice to die of incineration, blunt-force trauma, and blood loss as he is destined to when the plane crashes at terminal velocity on a farm a few minutes drive from a London hospital. At this point, all characters are assuredly dead.
Tom Cruise wakes up in a plastic bag, fine, except he sees and hears from the guy from The New Girl in all mirrors and static pools of water from now on, a fate far worse than death by airplane crash and definitely worse than death by Egyptian princess rape and ritual. Jenny arrives, largely unsurprised at Tom’s remarkable survival because she too cheated death moments earlier. Feeling the call of Sexy Twenty-Something Princess, they drive out to the farm in search of a dagger and find the decrepit form of said princess making out with no-name security guards and stealing their fleshiness. Fearing for their lives, Tom and Jenny drive in circles until captured. Twenty-Something Princess shows Tom and Jenny that the dagger they were looking for was hidden in a reliquary in a British church from the time of the Crusades and threatens to stab Tom with it, thereby releasing Set upon the Earth. She monologues and teases too long.
Dr. Jekyll from an entirely different era, style, and fiction rescues Jenny and Tom. Cut to: his secret lab beneath The British Museum. Sexy Princess is chained to a mercury-pumping device Dr. Jekyll had waiting. Jekyll monologues about nonsense for a very long time, eventually settling on the gist of his thesis, he’s got to stab Tom in the chest with the dagger to release Set upon the Earth. He then turns into Hyde and brawls Tom. The Princess escapes and demonstrates that she didn’t really need Set’s powers to unleash hell on London, shattering all the windows of The British Museum and filling the streets with a swarm of dust and debris. A large chunk of human history is lost in the incalculable tragedy.
Cut to: the streets. Jenny and Tom split up. Sexy Twenty-Something Princess raises an undead army in the secret Egyptian crypts in the subway system and steals the red rock from the beginning. She puts the red rock in the bottom of the dagger. Cut to: the subway tunnels. Tom and Jenny are back together. Cut to: an undisclosed underwater location. Tom and Jenny swim for a while and then split up. Jenny drowns. Cut to: a tomb where there’s no longer any water except a baby pool where Jenny’s corpse can float in a white t-shirt. Tom and Sexy Twenty-Something Princess brawl. At this point, only Tom has the character motivation of not wanting to be stabbed in the chest with the dagger thereby releasing Set upon the Earth. He stabs himself in the chest with the dagger. Set is nowhere to be found. Sexy Twenty-Something Princess is very upset. They make out. She shrivels. Jenny comes back to life. Tom hides in the shadows.
Cut to: Iraq. That guy from The New Girl is back alive. He and Tom descend on desert horses to a village of Islamic militants and presumably massacre them. Close.
Six writers, seven paragraphs. I assume writer two and writer seven were the same since those were the only linked sections of the entire story. Otherwise they picked one sections each and cranked that bitch out before surrendering their story fragments to producers who said things like, “Have we destroyed London yet? We need to do that in every film.” And, “You know Tom Cruise is, like, really good at holding his breath right. Some of this needs to be underwater.” And, “We’re thinking of having Russell Crowe play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a new British adventure series but focus group testing has been inconclusive as to whether or not that’ll make a ton of money. Can you write him in so we can see how audiences respond?” And, “We need more sex talk. Make a joke about Tom Cruise having sex with the lead actress and lasting only fifteen seconds. No, he will not have a sense of humor about it.” And, “You know initially we only had one plane crash. Can we get a car crash too?” And, “I don’t want to nitpick here, but there’s, like, no mercury in this thing. Mercury’s cool. It’s weird. It looks like metal but it’s obviously not metal because it’s all liquidy and shit. Put that in. God the lights in here are so bright and I have a headache. Make the changes or you’re fired. You screenwriters are a dime a dozen. Meeting adjourned.”