After years of isolation, an egotistic ex-cop makes his nostalgic return to re-unite with his daughter but not until he goes to war with a mob of ex-convicts.

Foxtrot25 has some interesting ideas and his suggested logline is an artful finesse of a fundamental weakness in the original logline.

A logline is a brief statement summarizing a plot.? A plot entails a protagonist pursuing an objective goal despite obstacles and adversities.? What the protagonist wants and pursues is called the spine of the story.? It’s called the spine because just as in real spines in vertebrate animals, everything in the body of the story is organized around, connected to and hangs on it.

In vertebrates there can only be one spine for the animal to function properly.? Likewise in a plot, there can be only one spine for the plot to function properly.? So what is the spine in this logline?? ?Because taken at face value, the logline seems to suggests two objective goals for the protagonist: reunite with his daughter and take out the mob of ex-cons.? And, to repeat, a plot (and a logline summarizing it) can only have one spine,? the pursuit of one objective goal.

What is the singular vector of action? around which everything else is organized and hangs on?? A father trying to reunite with his daughter?? Or an ex-cop fighting to take down some ex-cons?? Whichever one it is, the logline should be unambiguously framed in terms of that spine.

If the father’s objective goal is to reunite with his daughter, then the ex-cons are an untimely and life-threatening complication.? If the ex-cop’s objective goal is take out the ex-cons, then the daughter coming back into his life is a distracting complication, one that puts her life in jeopardy as well.

And then there’s the character flaw. A character flaw should be a subjective problem that is congruently related to the objective goal such that he cannot achieve his goal until he resolves his subjective problem. If he fails to overcome his flaw then he will fail to achieve his goal.? I kind of see how “egotism” would be a character flaw if his objective goal — the spine of the story — is to reunite with his daughter.? But I don’t see how it is congruently relevant if his objective goal is to take out the ex-cons.

fwiw.