2nd Script Treatment -- Bin Laden Project
Dir. Michael Bay Kathryn
Bigelow
Starring Jean-Claude van Damme, Jason Clarke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester
Stallone, Joel Edgerton, Jessica Chastain, Bruce Willis
“Sgt. Tank Furious &
His Brassballs Battalion: Mission Bin Laden” (1st choice, pending
approval by standards & practices)
Scrolling message before title w/teletype sound effect: “The
Department of Defense and the Obama Administration have released the most comprehensive
and accurate timeline yet of the details regarding the U.S. raid on the Bin
Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”
2nd scroll: The raid was officially conducted by a
team of “the best of the best”, known as the Brassballs Battalion under the
command of Sgt. Tank Furious.
The Brassballs parachute parachuteless from an unknown airplane
from an unknown height under the dead of night April 30, 2011, landing within
mere feet of the compound around 1:15 AM EST. After quickly dispatching the two
sentries by sneaking up behind them and quickly snapping their heads to the
left, Sgt. Furious and his four “Privates”: Dirk (a weapons expert), Beef
(intel genius), Brick (hand-to-hand combat) and Nick (a computer wizard, and his
first day as a Brassball) make various hand gestures to one another, including
the “two fingers to the eyes” motion, the “slashes across the throat” motion
and the “you left you right now go” motion before they split up to find Osama
Bin Laden (code name: Geronimo) and capture or kill as many of his
henchmen as possible using the extensive deadly training they received at an
undetermined time and/or place using their unending supply of weaponry they
somehow managed to bring with them.
As the raid unfolds President Obama stands back in Washington with
his arms folded wearing a headset in an incredibly high-tech war room, watching
with laser-like focus numerous giant flat-screen monitors projecting various
high-def views, rotating and turning unrecognizable shapes and symbols and incomprehensible
fast-scrolling data, accompanied by high-pitched typing sounds. Numerous
technicians also wearing headsets work fast doing inexplicable duties in front
of bright-glowing VDTs just behind him. Members of the joint chiefs in perfect
creased uniforms pace nervously behind him.
Back at the compound, Tank Furious stops and lights a cigar
stump gripped in his teeth prior to scanning his side of the compound,
illuminated by green night-vision goggles. His goal? Geronimo himself.
Furious scurries quietly around a corner and quickly encounters
two of Geronimo’s henchmen speaking in gibberish. Spotting Furious they
raise their automatic weapons and begin blasting hundreds of rounds. Furious
fakes left then right, running in slow-motion toward a wall as the henchmen shoot
all around him, every one missing. A third henchman steps from a doorway,
raises a rocket launcher on his shoulder and fires with seemingly no regard to
the damage it would do to his own compound.
Still running in slo mo with the contrail of the RPG gaining on
him, Furious grabs an overhead pipe and swings completely over as the RPG sails
under him, exploding in a roaring detonation against the compound wall. Taking
advantage of the blinding flash, Furious releases the pipe then runs three
steps up the crumbling wall, back-flips while drawing his sidearms, lands, tucks,
rolls and squeezes off dozens of shots into the henchmen, their still-standing
bodies twisting and twitching violently as the bullets fill them.
Back in Washington the President motions to a 5-star general.
“Why did Sgt. Furious shoot those men 20 times each?”
Obama shook his head. “He’s a killing machine.” “Carry
on.”
Back inside another part of the compound, Dirk leads Nick into a
lavishly-outfitted garishly green and blue-lit computer room with no evidence of
electricity going in or out. They are in Bin Laden’s ultra-sophisticated
high-tech evil genius headquarters. Nick sits down in front of a glowing video
display terminal and types rapidly until he gets a blinking “access denied”
message. “Come to Papa” he says as he plugs a thumbdrive into a USB port, types
rapidly until he gets a “bypass password?” message. Typing rapidly again he hits
“return” one time and millions of lines of data scroll past.
He looks up at Dirk. “We’re in” he says just before shooting
erupts in the next room.
“You keep working I’ll keep the mosquitoes out” Dirk says as he
sprints to the wall, listens, then fires his rifle through the wall. He and
Nick hear a muffled scream and a thud on the other side, indicating he had
successfully killed one of Geronimo’s bodyguards sight unseen through a wall.
Meanwhile, in another room Brick encounters a nun-chuck-swinging
bodyguard in a black hood and commences a ballet-like martial arts slo-mo hand-to-hand
fight with the guy while Tank Furious ducks and weaves through numerous
ululating and screaming white-robed bodyguards, ducking bullets and knives
while punching, stabbing and head-butting every one of them until he reaches
Bin Laden’s bedroom literally untouched. He puts his finger up to his headset.
“Brassball-one to Brassball-4, copy!”
“Copy Brassball-one!”
“Complete the upload, I’m going inside Geronimo’s teepee!”
“You can’t, Brassball-one, I need more time!”
“Time is the one thing we don't have! Brassball-one out!”
Cursing, Nick types furiously on the keyboard with not a single
error when one of Geronimo’s henchmen sneak in behind him. Nick has his hand on
the thumbdrive when a single shot rings out. The bullet strikes Nick in the
back, a slo mo geyser of blood spurting straight up as Nick staggers, lets out
a long and slow “Noooooooo…” and lands on the floor with a dusty “Oomph!”
Outraged, his partner Dirk turns and unleashes a barrage of
machine gun fire into the henchman, his body remaining standing while it
twitches violently as hundreds of bullets explode all over it. The henchman
was still standing when Dirk walked up to him, blew on him softly and he
tumbled over. He kicked the body twice. “That’s for Nick – and another for his
widow.”
Back in Washington the President takes a concerned step forward
as he stares at the giant monitors. “What in the hell do those
Brassballs think they’re doing?”
“They’re the best of the best sir.” Says an anonymous uniform. “They
know what they’re doing.”
The President looks back at the monitors. “Those guys are loose
cannons! I’m afraid we’re losing the initiative.”
In another area on the second floor, a babbling robed henchman
who may serve Bin Laden as plucky comic relief, ties a rope around a giant safe
and the other end around his own waist, planning to lower himself down into the
driver’s seat of a jeep parked on the ground below to escape. As he lowers
himself Beef enters the room, sees what is going on, takes aim with his pistol after
stopping to light a cigarette and shoots the brake on the safe’s wheels. It
suddenly rolls forward from the weight of the dangling henchman, dropping him
first in the jeep with a thud, then the safe rolls and crashes through the
window behind him. The henchman looks up and screams as the safe plummets and
smashes him and the jeep flat before exploding in a massive fireball.
Beef leans out the window and spits before quipping “I hope you
have your triple-A card.”
Back at Geronimo’s teepee entrance, Sgt. Furious quietly sets a
plastic explosives charge on the wooden door, complete with a huge digital
countdown that beeps with each second. As it detonates, blowing the door off
the hinges, Tank charges the room, only for Bin laden himself to drop from
overhead like a swamp snake, landing on top of him. With Tank pinned to the
floor, Bin laden beats him mercilessly in the face while screaming epithets
about yankee dogs and imperialist war mongers. Finally Tank is able to roll Bin
Laden off and, after losing their respective weapons, square off in a perfectly-executed
martial arts face-off.
Brick and Beef, meanwhile, had retrieved every hard drive,
laptop, Blackberry and CD from the computer room (along with several cases of
12-year-old Scotch) and were stacking them in the back of a truck, conveniently
parked there by someone.
Back in “Geronimo’s teepee”, just as it seemed Bin Laden was
about to put the finishing touches on Sgt. Furious with Chinese Kung fu after a
furious battle, the Sgt. grabbed a hot water heating pipe against the wall,
broke it from the joint and pointed it in Bin laden’s face, scalding him. “You
need to let off some steam,” Furious growls as Bin Laden screams in agony, suddenly
completely recovered from his beating before Furious pulls a pistol out from
somewhere and shoots Bin laden one time in the chest. The criminal mastermind
drops unconscious to the floor.
“I’m one yankee dog that ain’t yet housebroken.” Furious says,
chomping his cigar stub.
Cheers break out in the high-tech war room back in DC but the
President quickly silences them. “This is no time for celebration,” he says. “I
want verification of death, including DNA results. And I want them in 4
minutes.”
After moving Bin laden’s presumed dead body onto a cot in an
unlocked and unguarded storage closet the Brassballs meet up in the al Qaeda
leader’s rumpus room. They strip out of their gear, light cigars and poured
whiskey in celebration of a job well-done. Many of them pass around pictures of
their sweethearts back home.
But Sgt. Furious quiets them after the drinks are poured. “We
pause to remember our fallen comrade, Nick.” He points to a cot in the corner
by the door, where Nick’s body had been brought in by somebody. “Even though it
was only his first day as a Brassball, he was a good egg, and a wiz with
computers…”
Meanwhile, back in the dark but not too dark closet, Bin laden –
without even opening his eyes – slowly reaches up and opens the front of his
robe, revealing a Kevlar jacket underneath with a .38 caliber bullet embedded
in it.
Back in the rumpus room the Brassballs are finishing their whiskey
and good-naturedly rough-housing bare-chested when suddenly the door kicks in with
a splintering crash. There stands Bin laden with a crazed look on his scalded face.
Sgt. Furious wondered how Bin Laden was able to merely kick a door down when
he needed a pound of C4 to do the same.
Back in DC the President puts his finger to his headset. “What’s
happening, Furious! Talk to me!”
In shock at the sudden appearance at the man they thought was
dead, the men sit helpless, their guns and weaponry in a stack on the floor as
Bin laden crosses his arms in front and pulls matching 9mm submachine guns from
under his robes. “You Americans have ‘little’ friends, but you can say hello to
my very large friends!” he shouts, “Allah and Akbar!”
But suddenly a voice yells from the cot by the door. “Hey Bin
Laden!”
Stunned, Bin laden stops everything and looks down at the man
they all thought was dead – Nick the computer wizard. “Didn’t your mommy tell
you to always keep an eye out for Americans?” he says weakly just as he raises
his sidearm and fires a single shot straight through Bin laden’s right eye, blowing
off the back of his head. Bin laden can only stare in disbelief with his
one good eye before he starts shaking violently all over, squeezing off several
rounds from his machine guns into the ceiling before he gurgles and drops to
his knees, then falls flat on his face, dead.
As Nick’s lifeless hand drops to his side, it slowly opens to
reveal the presumed lost thumbdrive that contains every speck of the
information on Bin Laden’s criminal enterprise.
Back in DC, President Obama is infuriated as he continues to
scream into his headset. “Furious! Answer me! What’s happening there!”
Suddenly a drop-dead beautiful female technician wearing
a headset stands and holds up a SAT phone. “Sir? You’re going to want to take
this!”
President Obama walks over and gives the technician the evil
eye. “This better be good.”
He holds the SAT phone to his ear. “This is the President.”
It is Sgt. Furious. “This is Brassballs-one, Mr. President.
Mission accomplished. We’re outta here.”
“Damn you Furious! Where are you? You’ve breached protocol for
the last time …!”
In front of a sunset on a Caribbean beach, as a Jamaican waiter
brings cocktails, Sgt. Furious lays down the phone in the beach chair beside
him, the President’s indignant voice trailing off and unintelligible as he rolls
over and full-body kisses the bikini babe beside him.
Scroll closing credits
KB
– almost there on this one. Change Dirk to fast-talking tough Hispanic woman and send back to rewrite. I smell Oscar! HW
