A/N: A retelling of the 1996 movie "Skyscraper". I've made an attempt to "explain" some of the mistakes of the film so that we can see that they were really done on purpose, no really! Okay, maybe not...but maybe as a part of my Bedtime Stories series.
Easy to Explain
"As a lawyer, don't you sometimes find it hard to explain something that doesn't show your client in the best light?" Mary Hawkins asked.
Loftus Sparrow considered his date's question like he did most others - thoughtfully and responding with great care. "Some things are more challenging than others, certainly. There is a certain approach of looking at things from both sides and then deciding which answer is best. Anything can be explained one way or another."
"Anything?"
"Sure. Remember that movie we watched yesterday?"
"You mean that Skyscraper thing?" Her face scrunched up. "I'll never get back that hour and a half of my life. A bad movie made horribly."
"Now now, I'm sure some people put a lot of effort into making that...er...entertainment. And yes, I know we saw a lot of mistakes. But they can all be explained."
"How? Drugs? Psychosis? Drug-induced psychosis?"
Loftus laughed. "No. Well, probably not. But let me retell the plot in the form of a...oh...bedtime story." He usually did this for his daughter Survey, but she was attending a library day and wouldn't be home for hours.
Mary looked at the clock and saw that it was 2pm. "Bedtime story? Sure, why not I guess."
"Okay, here goes..."
...
Helicopter N25AJ of the Heliscort company landed on the roof of the Zitex high rise building in Los Angeles after flying over and around the many other similar buildings of the area and receiving clearance to land. Carrie Wink throttled down the engine and the chopper settled, waiting for the two suited passengers to board the shuttle service. This was a prepaid one-way trip, just a pick up and drop off so after the passengers belted in she lifted off again.
The buxom blond pilot flew along with her long, bright fingernails wrapped securely around the cyclic stick as she headed to her passengers' destination. The men carried a small black suitcase and little else, but it was common for her passengers to have little in the way of belongings on their business. Most of her clients were businessmen attending meetings, not going on vacation.
"Leaving downtown," she told the traffic control official over her radio. She then proceeded east until she was over the same buildings again that they had just flown over. It wasn't an error but rather easy to explain - she did it on purpose to give the illusion of better value for the otherwise short flight.
"Didn't we already fly over that building?" one of the passengers asked while looking down, suspicious and more than a bit nervous.
"That's an easy mistake to make. Not according to my GPS."
"What's a GPS?"
"General Proximity System. It locates me within five miles of my location."
"Oh."
Carrie giggled. Government men were so gullible - they would never last long on the street against any halfway competent enemy, she thought to herself. And with those suits and dark glasses, these men HAD to be government. She found the building and landed on it. "Thanks for using our service - try us again sometime," she said as they quickly got out.
"Yeah yeah," one said as he shut the door behind him.
While the two men climbed into a beat-up old car after making their way down to the street, Carrie lifted off. "This is One Rocket Charlie, come in handsome," she called into the radio. "Wake up Chauncey!"
"Keep your shirt on, you know how it keeps coming off," an older man said as he spoke into the microphone back in the Heliscort office. "Besides, you only engage in pseudo-friendly banter when you call in on the radio. You know you won't even give me the time of day in person. In fact, come to think of it I don't think I've even met you in the three years we've been working together."
"And I want to keep it that way - it'll be our special relationship full of mystery."
"Yeah, like the one I had with this Playboy dame. Anyway, finished with the job?"
"Yup. Gonna head home and take off these fake nails - they're killing me. I only wear them when I fly."
"Why?"
"That's easy to explain - it provides a bit more class. I just thought it would make for some irrelevant banter right now since we really don't talk about anything important."
"Well, as long as you have a reason. Maybe go home and freshen up before your next booking. Have fun."
Meanwhile, her two passengers - who we'll call Mr. Booker and Victim #2 - parked their black car in an alley while two more black cars drove up. Several other men dressed in dark glasses and expensive suits showed up to make an exchange of a suitcase of money for the black suitcase that held a large amount of electronic equipment that was completely ignored except for one small circuit board. Several of the men got confused which side they were on in the exchange since they were all dressed the same, but when some casually-dressed men showed up and started firing an M72 light anti-tank weapon and other automatic weapons at the suited men the point became moot. Fortunately, since it WAS Los Angeles no one noticed the pyrotechnics and the man named Mr. Booker with the black suitcase tried to get away up to the roof of a tall building, pursued by a South African man we'll call Fairfax because that was his name. Booker made it to the roof and stood on the edge.
"So be sure when you step, step with care and great tact. And remember that life's a great balancing act. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed)." Fairfax said before shooting Mr. Booker and collecting the suitcase that the now falling man forgot to take with him. Booker did wonder for a moment where that quote came from but his thoughts were interrupted by the pavement many floors below accompanied with a noise best not described. "Well, there was still that one and a quarter percent chance," Fairfax said with a laugh as he headed back to the roof stairwell.
...
Back at her high-rise apartment, Carrie was taking a shower with her eyes closed and conveniently didn't notice the sounds outside or the heavy breathing until her husband squeezed into the shower with her and did some other squeezing immediately afterward. Of course it was a game they played; otherwise someone watching might think that it was an intruder. But that was easy to explain, because no one would ever really think that would happen this early in their adventure.
Later the two wrinkled the sheets of the bed, although neither seemed wet now - obviously having toweling off first. Somewhere in the process a few of her long nails had fallen off, but neither seemed to notice since they were mutually distracted. They pretended not be expecting one of their pagers to ring, which it did at a very inconvenient time. Gordon looked at his and then the two had an argument about having a baby.
"Well, we were sorta in the process of doing that," he answered. "At least practicing."
"Yes, but you left your pager on and you just HAD to check it. You could have just left it off," Carrie said as she sat up in bed and for a moment Gordon got distracted and forgot what they were talking about before finally remembering about work again. The pause was long enough for Carrie to change into some skimpy white undergarments just in case someone was flying by their high rise apartment windows so they could argue in another room before she gave him a lift to work, with all of her long nails back intact and flying over the exact same buildings she flew over before.
"Why do you wear that green G-suit in a helicopter?" he asked his wife.
"That's easy to explain - it just looks good," she said as she nodded her head. The motion made her blond hair and other things jiggle.
"Oh." And he had to agree, his wife did look good. So good, he could never remember actually seeing her control the helicopter as his focus never went below her waist.
...
Later after dropping Gordon off at the high rise police station, Carrie landed on what seemed like the high rise same building roof as before and took on two more passengers, one of whom was carrying a black suitcase that looked the same as the one her earlier passenger had. But that was easy to explain, since rooftops were nearly all the same anyway and there must be billions of those little black suitcases around. Also, the man with the suitcase was the same Fairfax that had chased her previous passenger off the roof of another high rise although she didn't know that. The important thing was that they wanted to go to another high rise, the man with the suitcase said as he buckled in.
"Where?"
"You'll be on your way up! You'll be seeing great sights! You'll join the high fliers who soar to high heights."
"The Cat in the Hat, a personal favorite," Carrie responded, nodding her head. "I want to read that to my children some day, if I ever have any."
"Of course. You have great taste in classic literature. I feel we are in good hands," he told his fellow passenger although he never looked at the pilot's hands. "Take us to 1416 Grandiose Street," he directed Carrie.
Meanwhile, the men in the casual clothes from the alley shootout earlier rolled up to the twenty-six story Zitex building in a work van and jumped out. They all carried either automatic weapons or M72s, but no one around noticed - probably because there was a mysterious lack of people anywhere and no traffic. It's rather easy to explain, because even though Los Angeles is tremendously clogged with people and cars it doesn't mean that they are evenly distributed EVERYWHERE. Even if this WAS the business district. And a very large building. And in the middle of the day. And the guy with the M72 was probably just climbing up the outside of the building because he didn't want to wait for the elevator like everyone else had to do.
Once inside, the men shot all the guards except for one who just happened to know martial arts but he was defeated because the bad guy named Zarkov he fought ALSO is the only bad guy that knows martial arts. But it makes perfect sense because the guard was Asian and the bad guy just wanted to show off instead of shooting, figuring correctly that he'd need all his ammo for later.
While this was going on, Detective Gordon and his partner Jimmy heard on their police radio a code 411 nearby, which everyone knows is the phone number for information. Obviously this was dispatch asking for information on a building nearby so Gordon and Jimmy went to check it out even though they were supposed to be on an important investigation in the alley shooting from earlier. They did this probably because there were already enough cops in the alley and there wouldn't be a parking space nearby so instead of having to walk too far they took the call and went to the high rise, a twenty-six story Zitex building. On the way Gordon had to endure attempts by Jimmy to be funny and he really wished his partner WOULD give up his day job. Sure Jimmy would starve as a comic, but at least it would be away from Gordon so he wouldn't have to hear any more corny jokes.
You can see where this could be going.
You won't find it surprising to learn that even when the front doors were found unlocked with the alarm sounding and a dead guard inside, the two detectives separated with Gordon going on in alone and Jimmy going around back alone. It's perfectly easy to explain, since Gordon was obviously good enough to handle any number of bad guys inside while Jimmy was in charge of making sure no one got away because bad guys never escape the same way they go in. In all the excitement it was perfectly natural for Jimmy to forget to call for backup until he was under fire from the rooftop. Nakim, the guy firing the automatic weapon on the rooftop, got bored and switched to his M72 and fired at Jimmy's car just as Gordon ran out the back door. The car exploded and Jimmy was engulfed in flames.
"Now THAT'S funny," Gordon said before pausing. Jimmy continued to scream in pain while writhing about so Gordon decided it wasn't one of his elaborate gags and tried to help but it was too late except for the BBQ sauce. In all the excitement the guy on the roof was ignored and was able to get away along with all the other bad guys and an electronic part that was taken from a storage room.
It may seem like these events were happening during the same time of the day, but that is easy to explain because in California the sunny days (and they're ALL sunny days) are about fifty-four hours long and there is plenty of time to mow the grass, get a suntan, or to amass and assemble the four parts of a satellite guidance system needed to control the world. At this time, Carrie had landed Fairfax and his French goon Jacques on the roof (of course) of a high rise (where else?) condominium and waited while Fairfax and Jacques went to meet the soon to be late Mr. Simpson for his piece of electronic tech. After getting the piece from him, they shot him in the empty restaurant and he fell through the glass window to the ground many floors below. It was easy to see why the restaurant was empty because probably the prices were too high for people to dine there, and if no one was dining then no one needed to be around to work. And no one paid attention to the body falling because in Los Angeles things fall from the sky all the time, and one more airplane piece, shark or dead body doesn't really amount to much.
Meanwhile, the goon who had been apprehended in the Zitex building refused to talk at the police station. To ensure his silence the only female goon of the bunch, Natasha, came into the interview room and killed him after uttering "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple," proving that both one bullet was simpler than sharing power with another person AND that she was just as evil as her boss because she could quote great literature too. One might ask how she was easily able to come into a secure location like this, kill someone and leave - it was obviously before the increased security after 9/11 would have made such a thing more difficult.
Back in a now very familiar downtown, a Mr. Pollard comes in to work at the Zitex headquarters. He heads to the 16th floor of the eighty-six floor building to do some computer work in a Mr. Drakes' office, although it seems a little suspicious even though there seem to be a lot of people around in the lobby and outside the building walking past. Even the goons arrive with weapons stowed out of sight in carry bags as Fairfax and Jacques arrive on a very familiar-looking roof aboard Carrie's helicopter, which has lost radio contact thanks to Jacques helping the antenna to fall off. She checked the antennae after she powered down the craft and headed to a stairwell to enter the building - obviously parts fall off her helicopter so frequently she didn't feel anything was suspicious. The goons entered the building through the front door and shot the two security guards at the front desk, conveniently when all the people milling about earlier were gone. This can be explained by the bad guys timing their entrance just right when no one is around and the security chief in the main control room wasn't paying attention to his bank of monitors and no one was in earshot of the carnage. Also, no one must have tried to get in or out of the doors after that because the goons shut all access to the building but no one noticed. This is easy to explain because probably everyone was busy on their lunch hour or maybe there was a birthday party in the breakroom.
The goons rounded up the people working in the building to hold them as hostages, although remarkably there were very few people considering this was an eighty-six floor building. Since it's a Saturday, I guess everyone else left early to go home which is good because there weren't really enough goons to thoroughly search the building, even with fancy high tech like infrared, cameras, and tight leather outfits.
At this point a Mr. Cranston showed up with a - you guessed it - small black suitcase with the final electronic part Fairfax needed. Cranson wanted a small fortune for the piece, which Fairfax took exception to but that's easy to explain if you think about it; if you have power over the world then the money just comes along as a bonus. The deal officially turned "sour", which means that a lot of bullets are going to start flying and they did. Fairfax and his goons shot about a million times while Cranston and his bodyguard only got off less than a hundred, but it still took a long time before somebody was hit - which just goes to show that lack of marksmanship can be overcome eventually with time and somehow never having to stop to reload. Cranston's bodyguard probably would have shot better but he held his handgun sideways which is easy to explain because it just looks so much cooler in a gunfight. But not safer, as he found out after being riddled with lead and other alloys. A badly wounded Cranston escaped into an elevator and met up with Carrie on the twentieth floor, who was still in the building after calling in to have a short conversation with her office. It was made even shorter when the bad guys cut the phone lines while sealing the entrances to the building.
I know what you're thinking - if this was an eighty-six story building where she landed on the roof, what is she doing on the twentieth floor? The answer is easy to explain; she probably just bumped an elevator button by mistake and ended up here. Which would have been good for Cranston, but he's going to die later. It would have been good for Carrie except now the goons were after her. And Mr. Pollard - bet you forgot about him, didn't you? - JUST happened to be on the floor as well even though he was supposed to be on the sixteenth floor. Due to his alarmed look we know now that he isn't with the other bad guys even though he seemed suspicious when he came in.
Soon Carrie manages to - well, carry - Cranston up sixty-six flights of stairs before he collapses on the roof access and entrusts her with the suitcase. Completely not winded from her ordeal, she runs to the edge of the roof and when one of the goons appears (not winded, either) with the now ubiquitous automatic weapon, she jumped off the edge. Of course this seemed foolhardy, but we find out that there was a window washer scaffolding just below that she landed on, out of sight. Perplexed, the goon saw the moving steel cable of the scaffold which we missed in all the excitement because it certainly wasn't there before and followed it to the edge. Seeing Carrie below, he once again proves that no matter how many bullets you fire you're not going to get the hero or heroine as the case may be - at least not fatally. Of course all these shots that were missing but continued on to the ground below weren't noticed because, well, things fall off buildings almost as much as they do out of the sky - which is sometimes one in the same when you think about it. Dodging a few hundred bullets, she finally managed to ping pong around the side of the building until breaking and crashing through an impact-resistant window into a room. No one notices the noise, but maybe someone is running a vacuum cleaner or bowling alley and it covered up the racket. Meanwhile, Fairfax (also not winded) finished off Cranston but not before torturing him with another quote: "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." Cranston hadn't been crying, but Fairfax made sure whatever he was feeling was now past tense. Just to keep evil and not get lazy, Zarkov - who had saved his ammunition - continued to save it as he took out two repairmen working outside. Not only does he save ammo, he also saved dialogue by continuing to not say anything.
Now we once again meet Security Officer Dudley Wright, who appears to be the most inept of all the security we've met so far. He also appears to be the only one alive, but that's easy to explain because even if the goons met up with him they wouldn't consider him a threat and after all, with eighty-six floors to clear it's understandable that the goons missed a few people. Carrie stashed the suitcase she had in a waste cart and goes to find some help, running into Mr. Pollard who seems to be in a hurry to leave. Of all the amazing coincidences, she's back on the twentieth floor again it would seem, even though Pollard was supposed to be on the sixteenth. But that's easy to explain, because with so many floors and rooms and cubicles then everywhere seems to be about the same place and only showing a few people at a time makes you think there are more people around. So she tried to get back to the roof with another bystander in tow but the goons shut down the elevator on the twenty-third floor. The bystander is really a jerk, so we won't mind if he was killed if the bad guys should just happen to show up at the elevator.
I was right. They did. He's dead. Good thing Carrie somehow managed to vault up through access hatch in the ceiling when no one was looking.
At this point the audience must be wondering why the police aren't around. That's easy to explain - with a city as large as Los Angeles the police have a lot to do and sometimes it takes a bit to get to a particular case. But Gordon - remember him, he's Carrie's detective husband - had been called in with his new partner to check out the body of Mr. Simpson. You might be curious why a woman was casually enjoying a beverage in a lounge chair by the body with a suspicious lack of other people around but that is easy to explain. Remembering how big the city is, they MUST have more dead people around too and the novelty simply hadn't worn off for the one bystander yet like it had for the locals. She must have just moved here from somewhere else with a lot less going on like Bakersfield, since NO movies or TV shows are from there. Regardless, Gordon seemed worried when he learned that the killers were foreign and professional. I guess he'd rather have local amateurs murdering people since we see how good they are at stopping THAT. They went up to the roof and his partner found an antenna, which Gordon just KNOWS came from Carrie's helicopter, obviously being an expert on antennae. Somehow THIS gave him a bad feeling; up to this point it must have felt pretty routine, but antennae are well known as being bad omens.
While Carrie waited for help to arrive, how will she cope with the stress? What she needs to do is remember that she's actually a better shot than her husband, which is easy to explain because even though he has had hundreds of hours training on police ranges it doesn't compare to the fact that she's from Texas, where people apparently start working on their marksmanship straight out of the womb. She flashes back to showing off her shooting skills to her husband, then disrobing enough to show off a few more things to him. Gratuitous nudity over, she could now proceed with confidence that she has what it takes to fight back.
Gordon climbed aboard a police helicopter, which just happens to have the exact same paint scheme and call numbers on the belly as Carrie's Heliscort 'copter, but that's easy to explain - obviously Heliscort buys used police helicopters to use for themselves and also saved money by not painting over the old call numbers. Gordon is confident that he will be able to find her because he says there are only ten places to land a helicopter in Los Angeles. What he means is that there are ten places just in Disneyland alone, and hundreds across the city but he can only think of ten because Carrie only likes to land on certain types of rooftops that all look identical which narrows it down tremendously.
Meanwhile Natasha had caught Mr. Pollard, who made a deal to tell the bad guys where Carrie is in exchange for his freedom. This leads to the bad guys finding they missed some more people on the floor but finally spotting and shooting a certain blond lady in a green jumpsuit.
But wait, that wasn't Carrie! It sure looked like her though, what a coincidence. But it did give Carrie a chance to team up with security guard Dudley and finally get a weapon, and a very special weapon at that. She quickly proved that his six shot revolver is capable of firing over a dozen times without reloading, but because she's from Texas she is just probably able to reload an unfamiliar weapon while on a dead run while being shot at through a building she's never been in before. We KNOW she knows about weapons because she carefully walks around with her weapon pointed at the ceiling so she can shoot a spider if she sees one crawling around up there, just like cops do on television. But the German goon Leidermeier pursued her in a running gun battle, where we note that not only did they waste a lot a ammunition and shoot up old office equipment but that muscle guys who speak German usually have the longest names. But in classic bad guy fashion Leidermeier pauses to gloat before the final kill shot, allowing Dudley to take him out from behind - maybe he isn't so inept after all. And now that a bad guy has been killed by the good guys, we know it's only a matter of time before they start dropping like dead...er...bad guys.
At this point Gordon spotted Carrie's helicopter and was dropped off on the roof, where he started to make his way down the stairwell while the bad guys are alerted to his presence. MANY floors below (sixty-three if we do the math) Carrie is moving about and found the young boy that we saw earlier riding around on his Big Wheel ™. She and the boy hid under a desk while two goons lurk about. When Dudley got behind one, he just watches him leave and then gets knocked out from behind, proving that maybe he's still inept after all or just had beginner's luck with Leidermeier. Carrie told the scared boy to stay under the desk where it's safe and she moved on.
Somehow, Carrie managed to make it all the way down to the seventh floor now without being detected, but that is easy to explain because the bad guys are obviously distracted with Gordon prowling around above and the hostages and several are probably still wondering where the police response is and just where is that briefcase with the final piece? But she telephoned the bad guys - how, I'm not quite sure but she obviously has a working knowledge of the phone system of the building and just where the French bad guy Jacques is monitoring everything - and arranged to turn herself in with the knowledge of where the briefcase is hidden if the hostages are released. She then decided to take up smoking by setting several waste baskets on fire to confirm her location and Fairfax went to get her and brought her down near the lobby where the hostages appear to be held.
Mr. Pollard was escorted down, and tried to buy his freedom with money he has been siphoning from the company. Fairfax was amused and says "Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant, Around the whole room, and he took every present!" before having Natasha shoot him. This is easily explained in another book that says there is no honor among thieves, but it would seem Mr. Pollard hadn't read that one - and certainly wouldn't now. Fairfax then renegotiated with Carrie by having Natasha kill a hostage and threaten to continue if she didn't show him where the briefcase was, to which she reluctantly agrees. Carrie that is, as Natasha seemed perfectly fine killing people no matter which side they are on.
Sometimes life even interrupts bad guys, and just then the fire department showed up, no doubt due to the fire alarm set off by Carrie's waste can fire. Jacques said that the entire fire department has shown up, although we only see one ladder truck. This is easy to explain - obviously Zitex has its own fire department and it consists of only one truck. Duh. And obviously because they aren't the official city fire department, they immediately extended the ladder up to some floor even though none of them had actually checked to see if there WAS a fire. And because the bad guys can predict this, they had Natasha wait until a fireman climbed the ladder before hitting it with the M72 at which point the philosophical conundrum arises of who puts out the firemen, although I won't bore you by saying it in Latin.
Maybe some of the nice police officers that have now arrived can put them out, although we don't know WHY they have arrived exactly since we haven't seen anybody call. They probably just finally worked their way down the dispatch list until reaching "Automatic weapon fire coming from top of Zitex headquarters - check it out after you finish lunch". The police helicopter that dropped off Gordon earlier showed up again (or at least one exactly like it), so he might have called his police friends. Oh dear, Natasha still seems to be wielding that M72.
Goodbye helicopter, I doubt Heliscort will be buying THAT one at the next police auction. And now we finally get to see some civilians gathering near the building, with the police captain calling for crowd control. It's not really much of a crowd - more people wait in line for coffee at a Starbucks than are watching on street level, but I'm sure the captain was just being cautious in case more people showed up to watch because there was nothing else fun to do in Los Angeles. They certainly didn't seem to be bothered by all the shattered parts flying out from the explosion of the helicopter. Oh yes, the bad guys seem to have loaded up an office window with C-4 explosive to detonate for no reason in the MIDDLE of the building. They probably just wanted some fresh air in the building, and everyone knows that the windows don't open on modern skyscrapers. In any case, you can add the glass from that to the stuff falling down too.
But the man who designed the computer system for the building showed up to consult with the police - I guess he just happened to be in the area - and when he looked through binoculars the gaping hole from the explosion was gone. This is easy to explain as a simple omission of a feature of the building which obviously self-repairs in the case of damage. He gave the police a plan to crawl through the ventilation shafts to find the computer override to open the locked building and luckily for them they had a team of smaller cops already available to enter the shafts.
In the meantime, it had been entirely too long since our last gratuitous nudity so naturally one of the goons tried to take advantage of Carrie's charms. We see that she had been wearing black undergarments now but there's a good reason for that; however, the reason has escaped me as I was a bit distracted, along with the goon who didn't notice that Carrie was reaching for a letter opener. Apparently it is also good for opening veins in the leg, which allowed Carrie to get the man's gun and shoot him, sending yet another body plummeting many floors to the ground below. We do see the goon land on three different spots of a car, but that's easy to explain - he must have bounced a few times. The insurance claim will have to state that the automobile was in a pedestrian accident, although Johnny Hill wasn't on foot at the time.
Nakim went back searching for Gordon, but seemed to have his attention wavering a bit (or just overconfident) after going through so many rooms, cubicles and floors. Gordon took the opportunity to plug Nakim, now evening the score with Carrie (and Dudley and Natasha) at one bad guy each, although technically Natasha is ahead on points simply from total bodies when you count the good guys she's killed too even though they are only used as a tie-breaker.
Oh my. How many times do they stress in training not to make noise while crawling through air ducts? No loose change, no car keys, no phone and DEFINITELY no police radio turned on. At least MOST of the short police dudes made it out before Jacques figured out where one was. Good thing his handgun held so many rounds as he narrowed down his search using the holepunch technique. Good for him anyway, bad for the officer. The color of blood that dripped onto Jacques' hand was an odd shade of red, but maybe it's not supposed to be blood but instead some paint that just happened to be carelessly left in the duct.
Gordon made it to the basement, where Jacques directed Zarkov to take care of him, and we don't mean take his lunch order. They got into a running gun battle and, amazingly, we saw BOTH reload during the fight. They both lost their weapons and started fighting hand to hand until Zarkov prevailed and was ready to strike a death blow to Gordon when Carrie shot him from behind. This might seem a dangerous strategy, but she was obviously confident in both her aim and the fact that the round wasn't going to go through Zarkov and into her husband behind him. Score, Carrie 2 Gordon 1. They made goo-goo eyes at each other and then Carrie left to check on the hostages without rubbing it in that she's ahead of him on points now.
Jacques saw the handwriting on the wall and decided it was time for them to leave. Fairfax agreed, but had a slightly different plan. He says "When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you." He then shot Jacques, thereby letting him know that the second choice was the correct answer in the pop quiz.
Carrie made her way back to the hostages, and snuck up on Natasha before telling her to drop her weapon. Natasha declined the request, and Carrie upped her score to 3 before getting one of the hostages and Dudley to override the computer system to open the building again.
Fairfax, now out of henchmen and henchwoman, wandered the building until he came upon the boy on his Big Wheel ™ again, having fun. Why wasn't he scared and looking for his mother? That's easy - children's attention spans are even shorter than adults and he probably got bored waiting under the desk and decided to ride around, something he couldn't do while stuck at school or daycare or at Grandma Rose's house where it always smells like mothballs.
Dudley and his co-worker managed to unlock the building and free the hostages, then froze the elevator where Fairfax was taking the kid to the roof even though the monitor says they were descending. He got out somewhere around the twenty-third floor, took some stairs, and just happened to stop on the twenty-sixth where Carrie just HAPPENED to be looking around. Fairfax pointed a gun and told her to fly him away. In just a split second they climbed the sixty floors to the roof where no one was out of breath except Gordon, who somehow had beaten them all up there from the basement. They got into a standoff until Carrie made a deal to fly him away if he let Gordon and the boy go. This would seem foolhardy since Fairfax is already known to break deals, so we KNOW she had a plan. The boy ran over to Gordon, and Fairfax said "I'm glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone" before shooting the detective.
Getting beat up is bad enough, not to mention being threatened and nearly raped. But when someone shoots her husband, Carrie gets really peeved and she launched into an attack on Fairfax, kicking the gun out of his hand.
"I don't understand how I could fail," Fairfax said rolling on the ground. "I assembled an international cast of villains. I quote one of the great authors of the twentieth century." Carrie punched him as he got up and kicked him again. "I graduated from Oxford!" he yelled as he rolled once more, trying to scramble for his dropped gun. "I didn't even break the rule about threatening the kid!"
Carrie bared her teeth, one of the few things she hadn't bared so far today. "You forgot to have a goon from Asia! Oxford is overpriced and too hard to get into when a community college can be sufficiently rewarding. And you scared the kid." She tensed before yelling "And Dr. Seuss isn't just the greatest author of the twentieth century, he's the greatest of all time!" before she gave him a roundhouse kick and sent him flying off the top of the building to - you guessed it - the street below. I guess you could say she did fly him away, in a sense. Final score: Carrie 4, Gordon 1.
Later, Gordon and Carrie limped to the back of an ambulance where the boy's mother, who we thought was dead, surprisingly wasn't.
"See, I told you everything would be okay," Carrie said to the boy.
"Yeah? What about operations and huge medical bills? And long extensive physical rehabilitation? And now I'M going to be in therapy for decades due to the emotional trauma! Oh look, my puppy!" he said as he took the dog and climbed into the back with his mother.
"Good. For a moment I thought that we'd end up adopting him," Gordon said weakly.
"Ew! I want to start our own kid from scratch."
"Okay, but first we have to get back to the rooftop and get to your helicopter."
Carrie looked up. "It's not the most unlikely thing that's happened today".
...
Survey Sparrow walked into the room and found her father reading. "Hello Daddy," she greeted him.
"Hello Sparrow. How was the library?"
She pulled several books from a bag she had been dragging. "They had a used book sale, so I found some to read." She handed them to her father.
Loftus perused the purchases. "Bread and other Bakery Delights. Intermediate Algebra. Beginning Mandarin?" he asked.
"Of course - you don't expect me to study Cantonese do you?"
"It's your allowance, but I think it's an odd choice for an eleven year old."
"Not in China," she said with a grin. "Where's Mary? I thought she was going to stay for dinner."
"Well, she...ah..." Loftus struggled to explain. "I told her a bedtime story and she didn't think it was very funny and left. I don't know if she'll come visit again or not."
"Did she at least ask questions during the story?"
"No. Not a one."
"That's alright. Anybody, even an adult, who can't appreciate a good bedtime story is someone I don't want to play with."
Loftus chuckled. "That's a good point. Maybe you're right, Survey. Maybe someday we'll find someone else who really LIKES a good bedtime story."
Survey nodded her head. "Just to keep you in good practice, I am officially putting in my request for another one tonight."
"Okay, if we can get everything cleaned up before eight then I'll tell you another one. Do you want an old one or a new one?"
"An old one, please. That way I can tell if you make a mistake."
"Oh, I still make them sometimes."
"I know, but sometimes they're the BEST part!"
The End
A/N: What can I say; it WAS a direct-to-video movie. But at least Anna Nicole Smith had one big thing going for her. Well, two actually - but I think they're traditionally counted together as a pair. In the movie the villain quoted Shakespeare (getting one of the citations wrong) but we've substituted something a little more modern.
Of course Survey was gone during the viewing and the retelling - give Loftus SOME credit.