Hostile Takeover
Shane KuhnSimon & Schuster, 2015There's a particularly annoying little gimmick that's leapt like a virus from one cheesy action-movie to the next in the last ten years. I'm sure you've noticed it: an action-hero (or, even more annoyingly, the action-couple) fire their huge automatic guns at the floor under their feet in a perfect circle, and then when the last perforation happens, they ride the perfect circle they've created down to the floor below. Even in the hyperventilating vocabulary of the modern action movie, the gimmick is outstandingly stupid; the recoils at those angles would pull the action hero's arm out of its socket instantly, the super-hot ejected shell casings would pelt and then cripple the action hero, the weight of the action hero would punch through the circle long before it was complete, and of course a fifteen-foot drop straight down onto a flat floor below would leave the action hero in no shape to segue right into krav maga set to rock music. And so on. Every time you see the gimmick, you wish you hadn't – it instantly lowers the already ground-level discourse of action movies. It introduces a level of anvil-and-parachute Looney Tunes physics, but without the Looney Tunes payoff in laughter.The fact that it takes author Shane Kuhn less than 30 pages to use that gimmick in his new book Hostile Takeover points to a besetting problem with the book. The fact that Kuhn alters the gimmick – he dumps the guns and uses “shaped charges” to blow the circle instead – points to a besetting problem with the author.Hostile Takeover is the second novel in Kuhn's thriller series starring paid assassin John Lago (following the excellent The Intern's Handbook). In it, he's sifting through the fallout from the previous book's hyper-violent climax, on the run from his former employers at Human Resources, Inc., an assassination bureau masquerading as an intern-placement agency (where HR agents infiltrate big businesses and work their way into the proximities of “well-heeled Fortune 500 golf zombies” in order to kill them) - and tangling once again with Alice, the heavily-armed love of his life. The two fight and screw and perform field surgery on each other, and the book will overjoy its obvious young-male-videogamer target demographic with these things in exactly equal measure as it pisses off anybody who's actually fought, screwed, or fished a bullet out of a friend's shoulder in a bathroom.The problem is that Kuhn still thinks he can use bad tools to good ends. You can see it right away in his change to that action-movie gimmick: he's seen that gimmick in plenty of movies, and he's smart enough to know its many, many logical impossibilities – but he still really, really wants to use it, dammit! So instead of dropping it wholesale and oh, I don't know, thinking up something equally cool but workable, he tinkers with it until he thinks he's fixed it. Likewise with great chunks of his prose throughout this book: Kuhn thinks if he's just clever enough about their deployment, he can use all the cliches he wants without being an actual bad writer. So we get plenty of passages like this:
But that was then and this is now. I'm twenty-eight years young and I've ripened like nightshade berries or pungent French cheese. Since having my ass handed to me three years ago, I tried valiantly to leave my foul-mouthed, trigger-happy alter ego behind. Greener pastures were my original destination, but there truly is no rest for the wicked (despite our infectious charms), and I ended up being railroaded into a collision course with, you guessed it, Act Two of my tragic life story. I thought I'd nearly seen it all, but this not only takes the cake, it kidnaps, tortures, and dismembers the pastry chef.
And it's easy to see where his overconfidence comes from – he's a very energetic writer, and he clearly revels in the voice of John Lago, as in the moment when he contemplates his relationship with Alice:
What's interesting is that our relationship was the perfect metaphor for all relationships. Love is the stepchild of pain and suffering, born of conflict and genetically predisposed to fail. Animals don't love anything but their next meal, and guess what we are and have been for millions of years? Basically, this whole love thing is like a new ingredient added to the primordial soup.
Hostile Takeover is a perfect tone-for-tone replica of The Intern's Handbook, but this is more a weakness than a strength: if you're deliberately serving up this many Hollywood-style cliches, only the freshness of your concept will save you – and it can't really do that the second time around. But then, according to Hollywood Reporter, Dave Franco has signed on to play John Lago in a movie version of The Intern's Handbook – so maybe all those comfortable cliches served their intended purpose after all.
