PACE & TONE:
The pace and tone are fine for the story overall.
You have a crime/chase genre pace but with a noir-ish tone. The tone could be boosted to make
it more noir-ish and unique as you are then combining adjacent sub-genres in a way we haven’t
seen. I would recommend doing this for a few reasons. You have these noir-ish moments with
the father and then you have noir-ish moments with the enemies meeting and feeling each
other out quite a few times. These could be enriched to more fun, exciting and tense. By doing
that, it ups the tension in the chase scenes as well because it creates what Hollywood
technically terms “Oh Fuck Moments”. It goes like this – Oh, fuck! What’s going to happen if the
sicarrios catch up to him this time? That is what you want the readers/viewers thinking. If you
play your tone right then that happens. As it is now it is in the beginning but once he does meet
them its gone. What you need it for that moment to escalate to the next Oh Fuck Moment.
Think of Pulp Fiction – if you haven’t seen it go watch it right now. But there are multiple
moments like this and I believe your script has the potential for those moments as well.
For example – rather than hearing about what happened to Bam Bam. What if he goes to seem
and finds the torture that happened to him and there is a message that his will be worse. This
lets the audience know what the Volcan is capable of. Think of Marius in Pulp Fiction – we know
he is a badass and what his people do cause we SEE it done to others. In your story we are TOLD
he is a badass but never see it. If we see it and the main character sees it then we worry for him
and we know it will be worse.
For the type of story you are writing, you have to escalate tone the way you escalate conflict.
This is important and we should discuss this at length because otherwise I’ll be here writing a
thesis on this.
The second aspect of pace and tone is in the writing. First, you can create stronger tone by word
choice. For genre stories like this you need to get better word choice in the description. You can
look up crime genre or noir genre words on Google and find that people put together whole
sheets of genre words. You should be using these types of things to really infuse the tone
throughout the script.
As to pace, the story needs to paced out better in individual scenes. As it is now the writing is
thick and overly descriptive for a script. When eh action starts the writing should be shorter,
more staccato, to make the action feel faster. Then you slow it down in moments of peace by
writing out longer sentences for description. Same goes for dialogue. Right now there are so
many speeches that they lose importance. When a speech comes it should hold weight but if
there is a long dialogue every scene they become meaningless no matter what is being told. The
dialogue ship be more clipped for this type of movie and lead up to speeches. When they come
then they bring gravitas but now there are so many that they just become someone telling
something off screen we don’t see. Which goes to the old adage SHOW don’t TELL