Is this poor writing in thrillers?

Okay thanks. I was going to write it in a montage sequence, that intercutted with other sequences, since I thought it would take a few days at least. It doesn't have to be a bank though. I just thought of using a bank, since the only thing that is linked between three suspects, is money transactions. But it doesn't have to be. I could try to think of something else, if that's better. I just thought of a bank, cause I thought of way of showing them catch onto a trail, that I thought would be intriguing to the audience. I don't want to have the villain leave information as to where he was, because I want the protagonist to figure out everything himself, and work alone. If the villain posts where he is, then the cops would find out about it, and be ahead of the main character, since the cops are also investigating him, but have to operate through legal channels.

Like Toasty and Wombat have said, the real culprit(s) might be the editor(and the director looking over his shoulder)(or still others like a studio etc). Over the years I've heard many people (probably myself, as well) criticize the screenplay or the writer for problems with a film...or others for not making another pass over the screenplay. And I think I largely took it for granted that that made sense.

However, knowing much better now, I think, how very much the editor and the editing process has to do with how a film turns out or is put together, I would no longer want to jump to the (premature) conclusion that it's the writers' fault. Before I did that, I would want to verify that the flaw is in the screenplay. In fact, nowadays, my first suspect would be the editor. Or what about everyone else involved in the process? How about those involved in the decision to go with a script in its final form --in the cases in which a movie (the final edit) actually does closely follow the script?

harmonica44 said:

It doesn't have to be a bank though.

Click to expand...

Okay, I don't know if this will fit with your plot, but try this...

The bad guy needs to pass messages to someone else, but covertly. Encrypting emails won't work because such encryption raises an immediate red flag at the NSA, and traffic analysis on the emails can be revealing. So the guy is using images on a Flickr account. The messages are buried in the images using steganography. (All of this is not just plausible - it's been done.)

The good guys realise steganography is being used and manage to extract the messages, only to find they are also encrypted. Breaking good encryption is very hard (effectively impossible if done properly). But then the bad guy makes one tiny slip. He has been stripping metadata out of the images, but accidentally posts one image with metadata intact - including GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken.

Any use? No hacking required...

Okay thanks! Something like this may work, I will rethink the plot and see. I will also have to do some research on how to make it work, if so. I don't know if I want the villain to make a slip though. It just seems that if I have a perfect villain who makes no mistakes, that makes him more powerful and interesting, compared to accidentally leaving a peace of evidence for the good guy to fortunately find. What are your thoughts on that, when it comes to thrillers?

No-one is perfect. If the villain were perfect, he'd be invincible. Villains, like heroes, should always have flaws.