Dirty Bleach Mackenzie

Dirty Bleach Mackenzie (2012)

Dirty Bleach Mackenzie is a screenplay I wrote last year that is essentially a homage to 80s action cinema in the same way that Kill Bill was a homage to spaghetti western and eastern kung-fu films:

John Mackenzie is a former commando turned professional golfer who is trying to live a normal life in the 80s after having served in the Vietnam war. He is approached by his former mentor, the grizzly General Kirby, who wants him to go back into action to rescue a member of John's former unit whom John left to die in Vietnam. After thinking about it for about thirty seconds, John Mackenzie (codename 'Bleach') decides to strap on an ammo belt and take one last all-expenses paid vacation right into the shit.

How do I feel about it? It's a writer's first screenplay-- you can tell that because it is nearly three-hundred pages long (what was that Mark Twain quote about shorter letters?) It's pretty sloppy, and there are some weak points in it. Despite this though, I think that I managed to achieve about sixty-percent of what I wanted to in Dirty Bleach Mackenzie. There is a strong character arc, and there is also a subtle commentary on the way 80s action cinema conceptualised war.

My primary concern with Dirty Bleach Mackenzie was trying to convey how 80s action movies depicted violence. Think Arnie impaling the bad guy with a steaming pipe before delivering the one-liner "Let off some steam, Bennet!" 80s action movies were cool and badass, but they never seemed to address the emotional impact that continued violence had on their protags. At the end of Commando, Arnie gets both girls (his daughter and Cheech's) and you can bet your ass that when he gets home and puts child Alyssa Milano to bed, there is going to be a whole lot of fucking going on with his prize (the woman that he kidnapped at the beginning of the film, but managed to win over through the tragedy of his plight). Contrast that to say The Bourne Supremacy or The Bourne Ultimatum, in which Matt Damon is totally neurotic and prone to nightmares after his engagement in violent missions behind enemy lines.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not lambasting 80s action movies, and Dirty Bleach Mackenzie is not about saying: "Naughty, naughty 80s action movies, you shouldn't be glamorizing violence!" If anything, Dirty Bleach Mackenzie is a celebration of brutality-- shit, it certainly contains enough of it within its pages. What my screenplay does try to suggest is that these action heroes, the ones that we all looked up to as kids, are probably just a little bit fucked in the head because of the cool ultra-violent things that they have to participate in. Dirty Bleach Mackenzie depicts the slow mental unraveling of its protag in an anarchic and-- hopefully-- cool way. 

It probably needs to be edited-- I'd like to halve it essentially (so it is one-hundred and fifty pages long). I'll come back to it at some stage, make it tighter. However, I present it to you so that I may engage in film criticism without being a hypocrite. There are a lot of bad things you could say about Dirty Bleach Mackenzie, but hopefully there are some good things you could say as well.

If you want to read the entire screenplay, you can at Amazon Studios. Click here.