An assassin hired by means of text messages to kill a prominent mobster discovers he has been set up by the daughter of one of his father?s hits in a complex scheme of revenge.

Nicholas: the truth is that this is NOT a set up. Y learns that X set him up on page 97, (the script is 99 pages long). Pretty much at the very end, at this point he is mortally wounded and there is not much he can do about it, he waits in ambush for her with a gun in his hand, but dies before she comes. It is a film noir. No one gets what he or she wants.

Almiiitey: X’s scheme of revenge. Okay, that, I am afraid, will fall outside of a logline.

Just briefly, twenty year early, Y’s father – Sharp, also hired assassin, kills X’s mother, while X, then a little girl, watches. Twenty years later X follows Y to New York, she knows that Y will eventually lead her to Sharp, on whom she will exact her revenge.

X’s scheme is to have Sharp watch Y die, appropriate it seems at first, since X watched Sharp kill her mother. To do so, X at first gets close to Y. Y doesn’t suspect any foul play, to him it is just a one night stand.

Since Y receives all his instructions by text messages, X manipulates him to assassinate a wrong traget — instead of killing intended target he kills one of his employers. So, now the mob is after him, but he doesn’t suspect it, as far as he is concerned he followed his orders to the letter. The mob ambush him, but being at the top of his game he turns tables on them and comes on top, however, he is wounded and bleeding profusely.

He returns to his hotel room, desperately trying to solve the puzzle in his head, what went wrong and where. Going through the events of the past two days he realizes that the only “unplanned” thing was meeting X, he suspects that she holds the key to this puzzle. He breaks into her hotel room (she is staying at the same hotel in the room right above his) and finds evidence that confirms his suspicions. Weakened he stays in her room, gun at the ready, waiting for her to come back.

Meanwhile X watches Sharp die. However, watching an old and sick man die bring neither satisfaction nor closure. Furthermore, even though she seduced Y solely to use him to get to Sharp, she’s grown genuinely to like him. She realizes that in order to get her revenge she set up Y, a man she’d come to love, to be killed. She comes back to her hotel room to find Y’s dead body there.

That’s how the whole thing end. Needless to say this is just the gist of it. To get the full picture you’d need to read all 99 pages. The trick and difficulty for me is to compress it into a logline. Obviously it would be impossible to include everything, I am just trying to get something that would get people interested and wanted to hear/see more.

If the reveal of the ‘revenge’ plot doesn’t come until page 97 I don’t think there is a point in including it in your logline… that is of course if the hitman is the main protagonist (?)

Also — while the fact that he receives his hits via text message is the way that the ‘mistaken’ hit can logically occur, it’s a detail that can be left to the script and is not vital to expressing the spine of your story.

What about:

‘A meticulous professional hitman struggles to uncover who set him up when he inadvertently kills his powerful underworld employer.

I also think you could have a play with working a logline with ‘X’ as the protag…

Anyway — Good Luck with this.

I think you could you definitely lose the fact that he learns of his hits via text message — it’s pretty much superfluous and losing it would drop your word count from 38 words to 33…

Your film sounds interesting though — except I’m losing count of the loglines posted on this site involving ‘hit-men’ — definitely the flavor of the month!

Your scenario — in regards to having what is essentially a sympathetic antagonist (which is what the woman is reading like to me…) is reminiscent of ‘Zero Effect’ with Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller — well worth a watch/ read…

Anyway — given your edit I think you could get away with this:

A meticulous (or promiscuous..?) hitman unwittingly becomes a tool in a complex scheme of revenge by a woman he regards as nothing more than a one night stand

Much Luck, again 😉