Final Score Directed by Scott Mann Screenplay by Jonathan Frank, David T
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THE FYZZ FACILITY and SIGNATURE FILMS present FINAL SCORE DIRECTED BY SCOTT MANN SCREENPLAY BY JONATHAN FRANK, DAVID T. LYNCH and KEITH LYNCH STARRING DAVE BAUTISTA PIERCE BROSNAN RAY STEVENSON JULIAN CHEUNG LARA PEAKE ALEXANDRA DINU and RALPH BROWN RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes PUBLICITY CONTACT TO BE ADDED SHORT SYNOPSIS Believing his traitorous brother Dimitri (Pierce Brosnan) is somewhere in the stadium, Arkady (Ray Stevenson), the former leader of a revolution in the Russian state of Sukovia, locks down the Boleyn Ground during the European semi-final between West Ham United and Dynamo FCC. In the crowd with his niece, Danni (Lara Peake), is US- veteran Mike Knox (Dave Bautista), who stumbles upon the plot and goes about taking out Arkady’s heavily armed team. Can he get to Arkady before Arkady gets to Dimitri? The fate of 35,000 people inside the stadium – and many more in Russia – depends on it… LONG SYNOPSIS News footage of the Russian state of Sukovia shows that a revolution led by the Belov brothers – politician Dimitri (Lee Rogers) and brutal general Arkady (Ray Stevenson) – crumbles after Dimitri is killed in a Russian airstrike and Arkady is captured. Seventeen years later, Mike Knox (Dave Bautista) arrives in London, visiting Rachel (Lucy Gaskell) and Danni (Lara Peake), the wife and teenage of daughter of his best friend and fellow US soldier, who died in action whilst serving in his unit. That night, ‘Uncle Mike’ takes Danni to see West Ham United play Russian powerhouses Dynamo FCC in the semi-final of Europe. When Knox leaves his seat to fetch a couple of hotdogs, Danni sneaks off to sit with Brandon (Rian Gordon), who’s been texting her. It is not a good time to be separated from her man-mountain of an uncle, for Arkady, now released, and 13 of his goons have plotted their way into the stadium armed with semi- automatic weapons and enough C-4 to…well, blow up a football ground. As the match kicks off, Arkady and his highly trained team enter the communications’ centre and execute several people. They lock down the stadium and cut off all contact, including mobile phone signals, before running facial recognition software over the 35,000 crowd. Arkady believes Dimitri is not only alive but somewhere inside the ground. Returning to his seat to find Danni gone, Knox convinces a steward, Faisal (Amit Shah), to take him to the control room. En route they encounter not the usual security guard but a bulky Russian wearing a rogue pass around his tree-trunk neck. A crunching fight ensues, with Knox disarming his opponent and shooting him in the head. Knox and Faisal stash the corpse in a VIP toilet and discover that his bag is full of explosives. Radioing out, Knox alerts Chief Commander Daniel Steed (Ralph Brown), who contacts the control room but is told by the only living policeman, held at gunpoint, that all is fine. Knox is on his own, but is at least now armed with a radio, a security pass and a gun. Tracking the radio in Knox’s possession, Arkady sends men to investigate, leading to an almighty kitchen-set scrap involving guns, knives, pans, utensils and a deep-fat fryer. Knox emerges battered but victorious, and throws a body off the roof of the stadium into the street. “You have my attention,” says Commander Steed on the radio, and summons the SAS. But Arkady is himself about to make an attention-grab, bursting into the media room and forcing a TV presenter to report the situation live on air. If the UK government doesn’t hand over Dimitri, the stadium will blow when the match reaches the 90-minute mark. Faisal finds Danni and agrees to meet Knox on the roof with her, for Knox, informed of Dimitri’s seat number, must collect him. But not before he finds himself involved in a motorbike chase through the interior corridors of the stadium and across the roof. Grabbing Dimitri (Pierce Brosnan), who’s undergone plastic surgery to aid his fake- death, Knox fights his way back to the roof, where a chopper awaits. But not, alas, Danni, who’s been captured. As the pulsating match continues, a rooftop switch is arranged, Dimitri for Danni. But Knox makes the long walk in Dimitri’s place, disguised by the glare of floodlights. A gunfight ensues. Knox makes a death-defying escape by swinging off the roof on a banner, but Dimitri and Danni are captured. Arkady insists that Dimitri should broadcast to the people of Sukovia, certain that his resurrection will re-ignite the revolution. Instead Dimitri puts a bullet in his own head. Meanwhile, Faisal pretends to have a bomb, to ensure a swift evacuation of the stand that is wired with C-4. Arkady appears on the big screen inside the stadium, dictating his manifesto, and the stand blows. In the wreckage, Knox finds Danni but Arkady appears out of the smoke to grab her. She manages to break free with a well-timed headbutt, and Knox shots Arkady dead. In amongst the crowd who have gathered outside, Rachel waits anxiously to see her daughter. As the fans flee the stadium, Rachel pushes her way through, finding Danni and Knox in amongst the smouldering chaos, and embrace. Danni sobs as she holds onto those dearest to her, and they slowly make there way outside of Boleyn Ground. //ABOUT THE PRODUCTION// An independently funded British action movie with the production value and spectacle to rival Hollywood’s behemoths, Final Score was the brainchild of producer Marc Goldberg, who, in late-2015, spied a unique opportunity. “I’d made a few British movies and have a distribution company and my business partner is David Sullivan, who owns West Ham [United Football Club],” he explains. “During the final season at Upton Park [West Ham’s home since 1904 – for the 2016-17 season, they moved to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford], I asked him ‘What’s happening to the stadium once you leave?’ and he mentioned it was being reconfigured to be apartments. So I got in touch with Barratt Homes, the property company who had bought the land, to see if there was a way to use the stadium before they knocked it down.” At this point, there was not even an idea for a story, just the sure knowledge that to be allowed access to such an arena – and to be allowed to blow parts of it up – was a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity. “We had to start somewhere, and we felt that making a movie about sport or a movie about West Ham would not be widely appealing,” continues Goldberg. “So we thought, ‘How about making an action movie?’ We started with ‘Die Hard in a football stadium’. That was the nuts and bolts of the idea. I then got in touch with the guys at The Fyzz Facility, who obviously have been involved in the making and financing of lots of films [Silence, Wind River and 47 Meters Down are just three recent examples], and they came on board to produce it with me.” “Marc text me as I was getting on a plane to LA,” says Wayne Marc Godfrey, CEO, co- founder and co-owner of The Fyzz Facility. "So we had dinner in LA the next night. He said, ‘We’re all Brits and we all know about football and that West Ham are leaving Upton Park; I can get the stadium for four to six weeks after the end of the season. Let’s make a movie there.’ I was like, ‘You are absolutely nuts! But we are in.’ The concept was ‘Die Hard in a football stadium’ – we’d figure the rest out later. It felt like an amazing challenge as this was November [2015] and we were talking about shooting the next May. We had no script, no writer, no director, no cast, and no money! But we had this unique opportunity.” //ACTION STATIONS// Given the movie had to shoot in the summer of 2016, between the football season ending in May and Barratt Homes beginning the demolition of the stadium in September, Goldberg and Fyzz were able to map out a clear timeline as to what needed to be done by when. A brief was sent out to writers, attracting a flood of submissions that ranged from single-paragraph treatments to, as Godfrey puts it, “10-page epics”, and from these a shortlist of 10 was drawn up – it was like Pop Idol for film. Each participant was paid to develop their ideas over the next few days. This, in turn, resulted in a hot list of three, with the Lynch Brothers (David T. and Keith) winning out after various rounds of meetings and interviews. They were commissioned to write and deliver script by January 3. “It was good; a great start,” says Godfrey, who pocketed the manuscript and flew to LA with Goldberg and fellow producer Robert Jones for a week of meetings. “People were very accepting that this was a unique project and the location was a one-off,” says Goldberg, while Godfrey notes, “Out of 10 meetings, we got nine offers.” It was also during that week in LA that the producers netted their director, Scott Mann. “I had previously worked with Scott on a film called Heist, and he did a great job on it,” says Godfrey. “He was in LA at the time, so we had him read it and met him for breakfast that same week.