Blow-Job
I figured we
had Blow-Up, and then Brian DePalma put his spin on it with Blow-Out, now I’ll complete the trilogy.
We start off
with one of those overly stylized opening credits sequences we’re so used to
these days in stuff like Watchmen and Zombieland
and everything else. This one will be of
the film’s lead character, John Baldhead (Jason Statham), as a greasy photographer
doing a nudie photoshoot of Olga (Olga Kuryelenko) and every time he takes a picture it does some
3D freezeframe-hovering thing and shows the name of
somebody who did something on the film.
I want my name as the film’s writer to appear on an ass shot.
The photoshoot wraps up and John politely thanks Olga for her
time and bends over and scratches his leg beneath a high-tech anklet. Standing there is John’s boss, Big Bob (Bob
Hoskins), who is the publisher of the porno magazine for which John is a
photographer. Big Bob is looking at some
of the photos on a laptop and compliments John on his work and tells John to
have this new lot ready for the next issue.
John takes his camera and goes off to a pub to meet his parole officer,
Michael (Ian McShane).
Michael teases
John about doing something productive with his freedom and John pushes back
that he’s earning a good living photographing tits and bums for nudie
magazines, but you can tell John feels a sense of guilt. You can also tell that John and Michael get
along well as buddies even though one is the other’s parole officer. The two get piss drunk and tease each other,
wrestle about the bar room floor, and then as John is staggering to the door,
Michael grabs him by the ankle where the anklet is and says “Don’t wander
off too far now, mate, because I’ll know if you do.”
John
staggers home really drunk knocking trashcans over and tripping
frequently. In the morning he wakes up
face down on his computer keyboard in his home and clutches his head in
pain. He notices that on his computer
screen is a bunch of Arabic writing. He
looks at the screen and realizes it’s an extreme zoom in on a photo in photoshop. He pulls
back the zoom and sees that the message was hidden inside a mole on Olga’s body
in one of his photos.
He zooms back in and prints the image. He then feeds the text into one of those
online instant translators and finds that it’s a message about an attack
vehicle destroying central London. John
is puzzled and so he goes over to his shelf and pulls out the back issues of
the magazine for which he is a photographer and flips through it seeing that
all the models had the same moles etc.
He starts calling up the old images and zooming in on them, translating
the messages, and finding that they correspond to past terrorist attacks, some
which were foiled by authorities and others that worked. He realizes that his porno magazine is just
front to help relay messages for Al Quaida. He starts smacking his head and talking to
himself like McClane does, saying that if he tries to
hand this information over to the authorities they’ll think he has something to
do with it.
He notices one
of the plots he uncovers is set to happen that day on several city buses in
London. He grabs a sledgehammer and
heads out using it to knock out the panel of the floor where bombs are supposed
to be and then jumping out of the buses, collecting the bombs off the road and
dumping them into the river. A big blast
of water fires up like a geyser when they all go off at the same time and he
breathes a sigh of relief and then John quickly starts heading back to his
flat. He is intercepted and pulled into
an alley by Michael, his parole officer.
Michael tells
him he heard through connections that MI5 monitor the translation websites and
traced him after he used them to translate several terrorist plots. Michael seems hugely conflicted asking John
if he’s getting back into trouble. John
insists that when he got busted 20 years ago he was just a two-bit smuggler and
didn’t know he was running explosives for the IRA. Michael looks at him like he wants to believe
him and John goes on to say how he just stumbled upon the fact that the nudie
magazine was a front for Al Quaida and has spent the
morning taking bombs off of city buses.
Michael hesitantly believes him and tells him not to go home because
there are MI5 agents there. John says
he’s got to get all the back issues of the porno magazines if he’s going to
stop the rest of the terrorist plots and they’re all on his shelf. Michael tells him it’s too risky. John says he knows one other place where he
could get them.
We cut to Big
Bob in his office at the porno studio getting a blowjob on his desk with
shelves behind him containing all the back issues of the magazines. Suddenly the wall gets ripped off and we cut
to outside where John has a tow truck with hooks in the wall to rip the wall
off and drives off with all the shelves.
John
drives down the road with the wall on hooks dragging behind him and a bystander
stands there agast, John leans out and grabs the
mobile phone out of his hand and keeps driving.
He pulls over and starts using the phone to photograph the moles on the
models’ asses and translate all the plots off of the magazines. He hears police sirens coming and runs off
into the woods. The police cars all slip
on the glossy pages of the porno magazines and spin into ditches. One of the cops crawls out and faints. John steals his uniform quickly and goes back
into the woods and hides up in a tree. A
police car with Big Bob in it pulls up and Big Bob gets out and identifies the
wall as his and starts purposefully mentioning John’s past like he’s clearly
leading the police to make the connection of John’s involvement with terrorism. John mumbles to himself “You cheeky
bastard.”
The
cops tell Big Bob they’re done with his statement and then John sneaks up
behind dressed as a cop keeping his head down so the cap hides his face and
says he’ll escort Big Bob home. Big Bob
gets in the back of the police car and John gets in the front and drives a bit
down the road before revealing himself to Big Bob asking him “So how much do
you get paid to betray your country and frame me?”
At
first Big Bob is very confident telling John how he’s really fucked now and there’s
no way he’s ever going to get out from under this. John pulls into a petrol station and Big Bob
starts trying to get out but can’t because the doors don’t open in a police
car. Bob begins to panic and hammer on
the windows while John casually fills a jerrycan with
petrol. All the other customers at the
petrol station just gawk at Bob in the back seat and give John a respectful tip
of the head and say “Looks like you’ve got a difficult one in there!”
John
pulls in behind a warehouse and then draws his pistol and fires through the
cage barrier in the police car to hit Bob in the leg. He then rolls down the rear window just a
crack and exits the vehicle and starts to pour the gasoline into and on the
vehicle while Bob screams. He torches it
with Bob inside but instead of the typical action guy strut away from the
exploding vehicle he stands there and watches Bob burn alive.
He
then looks at his telephone and looks up and we cut to the next day in downtown
London where there is a big parade with The Queen in it. We see a bunch of Al Quaida
guys all do a group cheer in a warehouse and then strap on vest bombs and mount
vespas and roll out.
As they approach the parade John starts popping out from behind garbage
cans armed with the pistol, a cricket paddle and a samurai sword. He either shoots the terrorists or smacks
them in the heads knocking them off their vespas and
uses the sword to chop off their hands when the reach for their detonator
controls and then finishes bashing their heads in with the cricket paddle and
then moving on to intercept the next one.
The
final vespa terrorist sees him coming and triggers
his bomb blowing John back through the air where he bangs his head on a street
lamp and he gets momentarily stunned. A bunch of concerned people all gather around trying to help
him and calling for an ambulance. John’s
vision is going in and out of focus and he’s clearly woozy but in one moment of
clarity he can see Olga, the nudie model from the beginning, crossing the
street off in the distance. He gets up
staggering around like he’s drunk.
People keep trying to be helpful and are all over him until he has to
get kinda pushy and heave them off him as he chases
after Olga at a very slow staggering pace.
He
catches up to her and grabs her and starts to shake her violently asking her
how they recruited her and stuff. She
just looks puzzled and frightened and then a black van pulls up beside them and
hits them both over the head with blackjacks and pulls them in the van. We fade out of black with both John and Olga
tied up in chairs in some dirty basement.
John immediately resumes interrogating her about her mole and she looks
surprised and then mentions that she remembers the makeup people spending a lot
of time on her ass before that photo shoot he did with her. Then a couple of big torturemaster
guys ominously enter the room. One guy
starts unpacking scary tools while the other talks saying he’s not sure if one
or both or neither of them have been involved in foiling their plans, but they
intend to find out the hard way. The
torture guys give each of them a good beating before even asking them
anything. The one guy picks up a cattleprod and waves is intimidatingly
in Olga’s face. He zaps her with it once
and she screams and John yells at him to stop.
The torturemaster guy zaps her again but while
he’s zapping her he suddenly spasms and falls the ground and blood leaks out of
him. The other torturemaster
turns around to see Michael standing there with a pistol with a silencer. Michael shoots the other torturemaster
in the head and he falls down dead.
John
makes a confused look at Michael as if to ask how he found him and Michael
responds by motioning to John’s anklet.
Michael frees John and Olga and the three of them stealthily make their
way out through the building full of terrorists, which is just a slummy rundown
old factory building. They kill the
various guards and take their weapons and sneak through ventilation shafts and
other various Die Hard type sequences.
They ultimately end up in a big open mechanic’s area of the
building. They are high above on steel
beams while the terrorists are gathered below like the similar scene in Adventures
In Babysitting.
John sees a giant armoured Winnebago with guns and rocketlaunchers
attached to it and John has a flashback to the plot he read about in one of the
coded messages that involved a massive attack vehicle driving around London
killing as many people as possible.
They
reach the other end of the warehouse where they can escape but John tells
Michael and Olga to go on and he’s going to stay and take care of this. Michael tells him they’re too outnumbered,
but John insists saying he’s got to pay his debt to society. John turns around and starts throwing
grenades and opening fire on all the terrorist guys below. Michael and Olga join in the firefight. A bunch of terrorists scatter and jump into
the attack Winnebago and peel out. John
grabs a chain hook and swings down onto the roof of the Winnebago like he’s
Indiana Jones or something.
The Winnebago speeds down the motorway blowing up the cars of all
the innocent people who happen to be driving that day and John scampers around
the roof trying to get inside the vehicle. He
ultimately throws a grenade into one of the shafts where guns would stick out
and it blows a hole in the side of the vehicle.
A flaming terrorist guy springs out of the hole and climbs up onto the
roof and begins fistfighting with John. He kicks the flaming terrorist so that his
body lands on the windscreen and the bloody ash of his body cause the driver to
not be able to see and swerve around a whole bunch. Bullets start hitting the vehicle around John
and he looks back to see an army of cop cars following the vehicle shooting at
him. We get various clips from inside
the cop cars with the cops talking on their radios saying stuff like “Terrorist
John Baldhead has been sighted, shoot to kill.”
John
swings into the inside of the vehicle and beats the remaining terrorists to
death. He fights the driver causing the
vehicle to swerve off the road and tumble a bunch of times. The vehicle stops tumbling and the driver has been impaled on the gear shift and John is bloody and
covered in ash. John stumbles out of the
overturned Winnebago with his hands up high in the air and is shot a hundred
times to death by the swat team gathered around.
We
get a nice long pity shot of John’s bloody corpse on the ground near the
wreckage transitioning into an expository newscast in which a reporter tells us
John was implicated in the terrorist plots he prevented and blamed for the
carnage on the motorway. We transition
from the newscast panning out from a television screen that is in a dressing
room where we see a couple of makeup artists putting a mole on some hot chick’s
ass. The door gets kicked down and Olga
and Michael burst in with machine guns and waste the makeup artists. Michael calmly walks over to the sink, gets a
wet cloth and wipes the mole off the model’s ass and then he and Olga strut off
and we cut to black.
THE
END
Not a
bad story if I do say so myself. I never
saw Body of Lies, but I’ll put Blow-Job up against that as a War on Terror
movie any day of the week.
If you liked this, check out these other similar
writings:
This my attempt at
writing a blaxploitation superhero movie.
By request from
Renee.
They made her to fuck up
the past.
Now she’s going to fuck up
their future.
Let’s reminisce about Tony Scott’s greatest film, shall we?