I’ve been a fan of the Destroyer series since I was way too young to be reading books like the Destroyer series, so it is without outward bias or malicious intent when I say that this is one of the worst screenplays I have ever read. It probably wouldn’t sting as much if Warren Murphy’s introduction didn’t spend so much time blaming Hollywood greed and incompetence for their Destroyer screenplay not being made, rather than because it was an amateurish mess.

Murphy starts off by saying the idea of writing a Destroyer screenplay came up after he returned from “doing some work for Clint Eastwood.” This is a non-specific reference to The Eiger Sanction, which he possibly avoids mentioning by name since it wasn’t an original screenplay, but rather an adaptation of the novel by Rod Whitaker, who would later dismiss the film version as “vapid.” Not a good idea to remind people that you were involved in an adaptation the original author hated in the same introduction you complain about an adaptation of your original work. Also, Murphy didn’t hesitate to talk smack about Whitaker’s book in the past, claiming that Eastwood hated it after reading only three pages, and unsuccessfully lobbied for Murphy to receive sole screenwriting credit – an odd claim considering that the screenplay was not only adapted from an original source, but also that he co-wrote it with screenwriter Hal Dresner (who I’m assuming did all of the heavy lifting). So yeah, good call on name-dropping Eastwood and leaving the actual film out of it.

Considering that Murphy’s only other screenwriting credit (outside of “based on characters created by” for Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins and two failed pilots based on his Destroyer and Trace novel series) is the never-produced Shane Black screenplay for Lethal Weapon II that he co-wrote, it’s safe to say that Murphy never gained any additional screenwriting experience outside of a second Destroyer screenplay he alludes to in the introduction. Based on this screenplay, I think we can all be glad he stuck to his strong suit and kept writing novels instead.

In between talking smack about Chuck Norris (Because Karate) and Jimmy Carter (Because Liberals), he claims that Hollywood rejected the Destroyer screenplay because it was a low-budget script (remember all of those other mega-budget martial-arts vigilante films in the seventies? Me neither.) and stealing their plot idea of a white man trained in foreign martial arts (*cough* David Carradine in Kung Fu *cough*) in between all of the rejections. Of course, this is supposed to be a review of the Destroyer screenplay and not the introduction to it, but I feel that the author doubling down on all of the reasons his work failed to see the light of day having nothing to do with the work itself helps highlight how all of this deflection highlights the main reason is just that it is bad.

Boy, it is bad.

The opening scene to the screenplay The Destroyer involves a cavalcade of street violence occurring in front of the White House while an oblivious cop writes loitering tickets and America the Beautiful plays in what is supposed to be irony. It’s an opening tracking shot that makes Frank Miller’s opening to Robocop 2 feel like the opening to Touch of Evil. Following another scene inside the White House showing how stupid Jimmy Carter and his administration is (seriously, did Carter kill Murphy’s dog or something?), we get a Destroyer title card. What follows after that is a mangled adaptation of the first novel in the destroyer series – Created, the Destroyer – that somehow manages to get everything wrong in the screenplay that he got right in the book. The dialogue is ham-fisted and amateurish, the pacing is haphazardly stilted, and the action sequences are practically slapstick.

Even more bizarre is that the new material inserted into the Created, The Destroyer storyline is far from an improvement, including the main villain. Quoting his introduction, Warren complains that “since everybody involved in the production [of Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins] was a genius, none of them bothered to learn the first basic point of action writing: you can’t have a big hero without a big villain. (Basic Story-Telling 101.) So they had a useless stupid villain whose “crime” was selling cheap rifles to the government. How dumb is that?” So, since Murphy doesn’t really consider industrial sabotage of the United States military via corporate fraud and espionage a crime worthy of a serious action film bad guy, he replaces the organized crime syndicate central to his original novel with something even better in the screenplay: a hamburger chain CEO setting himself up for a presidential candidacy through creating a crime wave by shipping biker gangs to major cities in the same trucks as his hamburger meat. I didn’t make any of that up. Honest.

This screenplay is so bad, I tried repeatedly to convince myself that it was all a joke, and that Murphy’s introduction was a tongue-in-cheek con job that I easily fell for. If only that were the truth. If there is one undeniable truth regarding this screenplay, it is that fans of the Destroyer series can be thankful that this unproduced screenplay from the seventies was published as a historical artifact decades later, and they can be even more thankful that’s as far as it got. ( )