Why was I so interested in Drop?
1) I generally like the work of Landon, or at least hold Freaky in very high esteem. Freaky seems to give me a significant quantity of optimism for his future efforts.
2) I had heard enough about it to know it was some sort of high-concept movie, but I didn't know what the high concept was, and that's very unusual for me.
Well, it turns out the high concept was a character trying to do a thing that would take a very long time to do, but having a very short amount of time to do it. That happens like a half-dozen times in this movie, and is one of my bugaboos.
SPOILERS FOR DROP AHEAD.
I think you know the phenomenon I'm talking about, and it often features some sort of cross-cutting. A character needs to do something secretive, often right under the nose of another person without them knowing, but the thing is very complicated and that person's back is turned only for a very short time.
Drop is, of course, not the only movie that is guilty of this. You're likely going to see it in some form in thrillers, in movies involving spies, or maybe in movies like this one, where a woman's son is being held captive and she must do exactly the things a mysterious person is messaging her, or the son will die.
Most movies that use this trope -- would we call it a trope? -- use it sparingly. Drop relies on it a half-dozen times. I'll give you the most egregious example, and leave the others to your imagination.
The main character, Violet (Meghann Fahy), is being sent around a fancy top-floor restaurant by her mysterious interlocutor, obligated to slip poison in the drink of her date, and she has to make attempts to get help and alert the authorities in ways this interlocutor can't detect. One is writing a message in lipstick on a $20 bill that she gives as a tip to the pianist. I don't want to get sidetracked on this one because it doesn't have to do with the thing I'm talking about, but it does contribute to the script's lack of credibility. Quickly: The possibility of the pianist actually seeing this message relies on a) him looking at the money in his tip jar, something he might not do until the end of the night; b) him deciding to get a drink from the bar (you'd think they might let him drink for free); c) him happening to choose that $20 bill to pay with after pulling a crumpled wad of about a dozen bills from the tip jar; d) him actually looking at the bill before using it to pay. Not bloody likely.
Anyway, one of her attempts involves waiting for the maitre d', who is already suspicious of her, to be away from her station in order to seat some guests. This allows her first to try to call 911 from the phone that's at the maitre d' station, not once but twice, both of which cannot be completed, for reasons we aren't really clear on. You'd think a restaurant would indeed want to have this capability in case one of their guests had a heart attack or choked on some food. Often in movies like this the bad guy would have taken out the landlines, but there's no indication that's the case here.
When she's exhausted that idea, she moves to the unlocked computer terminal that's at the same station. Here she brings up a website for a domestic abuse hotline and starts a live chat. She's about to report what's happening to her, but somehow her mysterious interlocutor knows exactly what she's doing on this presumably unmonitored computer terminal and texts her something along the lines of "I wouldn't do that if I were you" right before she's about to hit send on the message she's typed. She hems and haws about this for about 15 seconds, then finally decides not to send the message, close the website, and hurry back to her table, where her befuddled blind date (Brandon Sklenar) is probably wondering why he hasn't peaced out of this unpromising evening. (Speaking of a lot of time vs. a little amount of time, all of Violet's strange behaviors and side quests have taken such a long amount of the time she'd normally be spending face to face with her date, that you can't believe he wouldn't have taken a lot shorter amount of time to decide the evening was not salvageable.)
So I suppose this means it took the maitre d' abandoning her station for, I don't know, three minutes? Four minutes? A long time.
Anyway, there are at least three other things like this that take place in the restaurant.
But let's forward maybe a half-hour to the climax of the film, when we get a different example of a very short amount of time vs. a very long amount of time, also an annoying example of screenwriting sins but not quite the same as the one I've listed above.
Namely, it's the "you have way too little time to effect a meaningful outcome on something that will likely come to a head in the next 15 seconds."
So when Violet finally unmasks who's been sending her these drops, she pulls a fast one on that person and he ultimately ends up going out the window. But not before he issues an order to the person back at Violet's house, who has not only the son captive, but also Violet's unconscious sister: "Kill them."
The command "kill them" could have been been executed in one second. If the assailant had some hesitation -- you know, it's not easy to kill a four-year-old boy -- maybe that expands out to five to ten seconds. So let's consider what happens with Violet before the person back at the house has a chance to do this:
1) She gets the cracked glass behind the villain to break by throwing a hockey puck at it, which doesn't initially work and takes an extra hit from something else to finally break. (I can't remember what that second thing was.)
2) Both she and the villain get sucked out the window, him down to his death and her hanging on to a tablecloth that's also got a corner snagged on some sharp edge to prevent her from falling.
3) Her date, who has already been shot in the side, crawls over to the edge and grabs the tablecloth before she can fall.
4) Despite this debilitating wound, not to mention a date that has been bizarre at the very best, he finds the strength to pull her all the way up to safety.
5) Using the app on her phone that shows her home security cameras, Violet can see that the man in black with the balaclava is only just now walking upstairs to her son's bedroom with murderous determination. You would say at this point that at least a minute has passed since the man's partner issued his order to kill her family, but more like two minutes and probably three.
6) Violet then asks her date -- his name is Henry -- where his keys are. She wants to get his car, apparently. She also has to ask where the car is in the parking garage, and I guess identify the car as well since she's never seen it. Though I suppose we'll give her the benefit of the doubt that clicking the unlock button will make some car flash and beep and will allow her to find it.
7) Henry, severely wounded, not only has to agree to this request, even though he only has a vague idea what's actually going on and what the stakes are of this request, and even though his date has been erratic at the very best all night long (though she did kiss him once, and maybe he was blinded by that), but he also has to have immediate perfect recall of where he parked his car.
8) Violet has to get down to the parking garage on the elevator, from however many floors up (it's the top floor of the building, remember), when you'd think the police might already be there, when the restaurant might have already been locked down, or at the very least, when the elevator was disabled due to needing to use the stairs during a building emergency. Remember, guns have been fired, several people have been shot, and a man has already fallen out the window to his death.
9) Violet then has to get the car and begin driving to her house at a breakneck speed, dodging and pushing through traffic. Even if her house happens to be close to the restaurant, the drive itself would take an additional five minutes at best, probably more like ten, and only if she doesn't crash the car in her panicked state, or get pulled over by the police who would surely be on scene by now, and would be very interested in a person leaving the scene of a crime that involved at least one death and danger to quite a lot of other people, driving at high speeds.
10) Now, I should tell you, Violet does have some help. Her unconscious sister has awoken from her conk on the head and is now doing whatever she can to slow the progress of her captor to the son's bedroom. But if we're adding up all the various time periods here, it has now been, what, 20 minutes since this man's partner ordered him to kill their hostages? And no, there's no apparent moral quandary from him in doing so. It takes an incompetence of the highest order to not be able to complete this task by now.
But of course, Violet gets there in time to stop the man and save both her son and her sister.
I get that she would try to do this. The alternative is that both her sister and her son are dead. However, that she would proceed with any likelihood that she would get there on time, and not just collapse in tears in a desperate heap, seems like she knew she would get there.
Of course she did, she read the script.
I want to end on a last way that this script proves itself deficient. There's a moment in the climax where the henchman appears to have the drop on Violet, finally able to kill not only Violet, but the two others he has utter failed to kill so far. How she gets out of this is ridiculous, but that's not what I'm focusing on.
No, the part I thought was really dumb, from a screenwriting perspective, is that the sadistic henchman -- you have to make sure everyone is as sadistic as possible in order to ensure we don't haver our own moral qualms about their deaths -- decides he must remove his balaclava before finally killing Violet.
The movie considers this some sort of big reveal, focusing in on the man's face as he removes the mask. Who was it, we wonder, who was collaborating with the man in the restaurant? Which character we've already met is going to show up here unexpectedly?
Answer? He's nobody. We've never seen this character before.
Mic Drop.
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