I thought this was not bad for a first time. It seemed like a word for word duplicate of The Departed, but we could fix that. The structure was off-key, but we could fix that.
When you write the setting, as you started in your first paragraph, you should show us what's happening, not tell us. "Three men are...", "one of the men is being..." You should be much more concise when you write. Instead, it's better to say "Two men, their hands tied to stools, watch as two bulky bodyguards beat and thrash a third man in the center of a dark, abandoned 19th century warehouse." Isn't that better? I could picture it much better than your original setting.
This should also be employed in dialogue. Rarely should the writer include a "bloody cough" or "grunt" in a line of dialogue. Here's a better way to do what you did:
MAN: Jackie, I swear... I s-swear... it wasn't me... I'm... I don't know who it is... I d-didn't do it...
I didn't include the "I'm not the rat" because it's so cliche and overused in gangsta films and amateur scripts. It's also a "show, don't tell" kind of thing: the character here shouldn't say that he's being accused as a rat, the audience should guess.
In the next line of dialogue, the dialect is all messed up. Here's how it should look like:
Jackie O’Hare: You shoulda thought about lyin’ in the interrogation room, Johnny.
What does that mean? Also, don't include songs in scripts unless they are crucial to the plot. In this case, it's not.
Johnny gives mortified look at Jackie, Jackie glares. Switch between shots of their faces 12 times. At 12 seconds wide shot to show Jackie pulling out a pistol tucked in the back pocket of his pants. At fifteen he pistol whips him, and continued to beat him rhythmically until 30 seconds into the song when the music gets turned down
The above paragraph should be changed. First off, who gives looks to people nowadays? And 12 times is way too much, it's boring and useless. And don't include "wide shot"--just continue telling the story. That's your job. Here's the revision:
Jackie's face, still hiding in the shadows, stares down at Johnny's petrified expression. Then Jackie whips out a pistol from his back pocket and lashes Johnny's face with it until his nose starts bleeding.
The next line of dialogue is CLICHEEEEEEEE. And the ending was also cliche.
Basically, I suggest you discard this as simply an excercise. It wasn't too great. I hope I helped you fix the "show not tell" part of the script, which will help you a lot. But after I finished reading, I thought that the ending was completely overtold and could be shown in an original matter, like Quentin Tarantino does in movies like Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. But this is just The Departed. No change. And that's why it's so bad.
You have a lot of talent, but in this script it just didn't show.
Points: 1108
Reviews: 404
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