The TLJ Act
Let’s say my passion in life is watchmaking, and I’m sent to the most elite watchmaking academy in the world, and then I am sent off to make watches. I make watch after watch after watch, and I see many other watches getting made, and my head’s spinning and everything’s great, but then they tell me because of the great number of excellent watches I made, there is no longer a need for watches, and I should just go home to my family and forget about watches, and in fact deny that I was ever a watchmaker, and if I ever did mention I made watches I would be, er, turned into a watch. That’s why I’m not ashamed to admit that I feel sorry for killing machines.
Sorry for, but not about to take one home with me and nurse him back to health. I mean, what did you expect, Shadow Government? Shouldn’t you have a contingency plan for blowback this predictable? So as we speak my labs are drawing up plans for a Killing Machine Retirement Home. All the strung-out spooks can go there and spend the morning playing violent videogames and then after naptime they can garotte dolls to their hearts’ content. We’ll even give them cow blood so they can put on their makeup for dinner, at which we’ll serve the most violent, anthropomorphic meals imaginable, like Turkey Pogrom or Massacre Salad, and for dessert – Little Chocolate Innocent Victims.
Because, let’s face it, Tommy Lee Jones isn’t going to last forever. Everything’s great now, sure. You could shrink a man down to microscopic size and fire him into the ionosphere, and Tommy would come back a few days later, hobbling and sweaty, with the man between his teeth. You could turn a man into a concept, and not tell Tommy what concept you picked, and he’d come back after a series of hair-raising pursuits with happiness in handcuffs, and sure enough once happiness was thrown in jail all those brutal killings of innocent hunters would cease. There’s no doubt he’s a top-class manhunter – and if there were any justice in the world someone would drag George Lucas away from the wholesale butchery of all of our childhood memories and get him to digitally insert Tommy Lee Jones into that movie actually called Manhunter – but for Chrissakes he’s pushing sixty.
At the end of this last one – what was it, Fugivite 6? – I was kinda worried he’d drop the ball. Yeah, he hunted the shit out of that dude for a while, but he looked pretty tired, and I swear I saw him getting a little confused here and there, and I thought he was gonna just grab a seat at one point while dude’s escaping via the sewers and maybe just rest his eyes a second, and then then when he woke up dude had escaped and killed the entire country of Mexico – if he woke up at all. Well, I guess that didn’t happen and Tommy tracked the man down, but then he’s got to do the ol’ one-on-one knife fight to the death, with a guy half his age? At the very least he should be training a young Hollywood star to do the job when he’s gone. If they did on-the-job training you’d get a buddy flick out of it, and as an added plus all those scenes of Tommy panting alone in the woods could be spiced up by a few hot wisecracks, with all the words the kids are using like “holla” and “jimmy hat”, ‘cause kids see a lot of movies these days and they like ones that have words that they use in them. We need to look to the future, Shadow Government and Hollywood, and that is why you should approve my new bill and film, entitled The Tommy Lee Jones Killing Machine Retirement Home Act and Fugitive 12: Lick a Pum Pum, respectively. Thank-you for your time.