Green Arrow: Escape from Supermax Script Review

Last year, Warner Brothers Studios announced a movie in development which took many comic book fans by surprise: a super hero movie without the hero’s name in the title and one that features the hero out of costume for 90% of what would be the movie’s runtime. This movie was first announced as Supermax, although the script I reviewed was titled Green Arrow: Escape from Supermax. If this movie gets made though, I expect it to go back to the original name, merely to avoid confusion with the upcoming movies of Green Lantern and Green Hornet.

It’s written by a guy named Justin Marks, a man who seems to have written a crapload of geek oriented scripts in the last couple of years, including Voltron, He-man and the Masters of the Universe, and Street Fighter. It should be noted that so far, not a single one of these projects has been made. The movie was set to be directed by another comic book associated film guy, David Goyer of the Blade movies and writer of Batman Begins. Since then, I’ve heard a sound bite here and there about this actually getting made, but I have a feeling if it does it will be someone other than Goyer at the helm, as he has seemed to move on. Assuming that the comic book movie machine continues at it’s pace, we might be seeing this one before too long.

A Brief History of the Green Arrow

Let’s face it, Green Arrow has in many ways been the poor man’s Batman. In fact, the original inception of the character is really nothing more than a shameless knock-off. Green Arrow was millionaire playboy Oliver “Ollie” Queen by day. He had a teenage sidekick, an Arrowmobile, an Arrowplane, an Arrow Cave, and the Star City police department even had an Arrow-signal with which to summon him. Somehow, readers let Green Arrow limp through the forties and fifties being content with him being more or less a simple Bat-clone. In the sixties, he found a home in the pages of Justice League of America, where the writers finally started to give Ollie a characterization of his own. Formerly a trust fund baby ( again, just like Bats ), Green Arrow lost all of his fortune and became an extremely vocal liberal hero, constantly fighting the corruption of corporate fat cats and the like. He ditched the Robin Hood replica costume and was give a cool redesign by comics legend Neal Adams. Unlike most heroes at the time, Ollie was given a girlfriend who was also a hero, the Black Canary. And just to hammer home how NOT like Batman Green Arrow was anymore, they turned his Robin like sidekick Speedy into a heroin junkie of all things. Despite sharing a title with Green Lantern through the seventies and early eighties, Green Arrow never quite made it to the A list, despite finally getting his own long running series in the nineties. But if there is a top of the heap for the DC Comics B-list, it’s gotta be Green Arrow.

So now that Warner Brothers seems to finally be interested in mining their DC heroes for film, they have turned their sights on Ollie. Except this is not exactly a Green Arrow script. And that is both its strength and its weakness.

The script begins with a brief flashback to Green Arrows’ origins. Unlike most super hero movies, this script is NOT an origin story though. And this is a choice I can understand. With the recent successes of both Batman Begins and Iron Man, yet another billionaire playboy who finds himself and becomes a hero is going to seem really played out to the average moviegoer. Especially when a quiver of trick arrows is no where near as cool as a flying suit of armor or all of Batman’s gadgets. In fact, Oliver Queen is only really in the Green Arrow costume for what probably consists of the first ten minutes of the movie. It’s here where the script veers off from traditional super hero flicks and becomes a whole other kind of comic book movie.

Green Arrow is framed for the murder of a man who is a part of Checkmate, a government organization that is the DC version of Marvel Comic’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Counter to the comics, in this script, Checkmate is against the tide of super hero vigilantism that is spreading, and exists to deal with the metahuman threat themselves. This is the first problem with this script; we get ZERO hints of any other super heroes at all. No mentions in the news, no brief glimpses or references. I can understand why Warners would want to keep their A List heroes like the JLA characters out of this, as they have their own projects in development, but there a tons of mid level DC heroes that could be shown or referenced. And none are.

Soon, Green Arrow is sentenced to life in the Super Maximum Security Prison for meta criminals, AKA Supermax. This is where the script starts to get really fun to read. Among the inmates of Supermax are a true shitload of DC C-List villains. Characters I would never expect to see in a live action flick. Among them are a few villains that the more old school DC fan might recognize, like Blockbuster, The Icicle, The Calculator, and even the Tattooed Man. We even see a cell for the Joker, although we never actually see him (and shouldn’t he be in Arkham Asylum anyway?). The walls of Supermax twist and contort every night, so no prisoner is in the same place or next to the same fellow inmate two nights in a row. This part is pretty ingenious, and would totally be fun to see pulled off onscreen.

The inmates are divided into three categories. The normal humans are in green jumpsuits (very  convenient for Mr. Queen). The mad geniuses are in blue, and kept drugged. A reference to Lex Luthor being one of them is made, but again, like the Joker, we never see him. And finally, the super powered criminals are in orange. All prisoners have a device implanted in them to prevent escape or dangerous use of their powers. A great deal of the super villains were put away by Green Arrow himself, which makes sense since there seems to be no other super heroes in this universe. Just about everyone inside the prison wants to see him dead. This leads to a moment that is a huge rip off of a scene from Watchmen,  where Rorschach is put in prison with those he put away. It’s almost beat for beat the same, and it’s shameless. With Watchmen coming out soon, I could easily see this scene being one of the first to go.

The warden of Supermax is DC Comics staple Amanda Waller. A big no nonsense black woman and officer of Checkmate, she’s a multi faceted character. But that’s in the comics, not in this script. No, here she’s a stock character, the big bad warden who sees Green Arrow as nothing but another criminal and will go to any lengths to break him. YAWN. We’ve seen this character before in a million prison movies and TV shows. Waller was used to much greater effect in the Justice League Unlimted animated show than she is here. I could see them getting Queen Latifah to play her, if only because she played a singing version of this character already in Chicago. A cool DCU character ends up pretty much wasted here.

Green Arrow eventually befriends, for lack of a better word, some of the criminals, specifically the shape changing Gemini and The Pied Piper, an old Flash villain. They hatch a plan to escape, which of course, no one has ever done before. What follows is a series of pretty kick ass action sequences and the movie becomes the super powered version Prison Break or Escape from Alcatraz.

But while the action beats are really fun, the characterization is either cliché as hell or just not there at all. This movie is all plot and almost never takes time to breathe. We get a few more flashbacks to Ollie’s time as Green Arrow, but there are not enough of them. We need to see why Green Arrow is such a bad ass and all these villains fear him. When the movie does take time to breathe, all the dialogue that comes out of the character’s mouths is very unoriginal. I can live with some cliché stuff as long as it’s written in a funny and endearing way, but all the stuff in this script is very self serious and reminds me of Heroes… in a bad way. There are a few plot twists towards the end that are really lame, and might be original if you’ve never seen a movie before.

I compared the recent draft of the Green Lantern script in tone to Iron Man, and to make a similar comparison, I’d say Supermax is a lot like The Incredible Hulk. The flashback and orgin sequences are kept to a bare minimum, and much of the story consists of a hero running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to find a way out of his mess. That movie somehow made it work, but I’m not sure this movie would fare as well. The basic idea of this script is really great, but it needs another pass or two before it should be made into an actual movie. If they can manage to inject some substance and nuance into this script I think it would be a unique take on Super Heroes that hasn’t been done in film before. Or it could go the way of Thomas Jane’s The Punisher, and nobody wants to see that again.