While driving his regular interstate bus route, an emotionally fractured ex-convict finds himself acting as a father figure to a forsaken young boy from the Philadelphia ghetto, even though he knows that the boy is smuggling drugs.

Firstly, this logline is badly verbose and clunky. For example, you could simply introduce the older protagonist as “an emotionally fractured ex-con who drives buses” and the younger one as “a lost ghetto boy”.

More fundamentally, nothing redeeming about the boy is told or even hinted at by the logline. (For example, is he a singing or artistic prodigy?) This is a big problem at two levels. One, there is no plausible reason to motivate the ex-con bus driver to feel paternal towards the boy. And, two, there is no clear reason why the film’s audience will empathise with the boy. Just one of these problems is enough to raise doubts about this story in the mind of a potential producer or development exec. Both together make it too easy to dismiss this project.

There is certainly the basic ingredients of a touching story about mutual redemption here. Certainly each character has potentially interesting and exploratble flaws. But the logline fails to connect the two characters is a way that convinces the reader of the quality of the story. The script could well be great. But the logline is utterly C-grade.

Steven Fernandez (Judge).