Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
What if, right, John Wick, but women?
That’s it. That’s the review.
What’s that Grace? Contractually obligated minimum review length? Oh, alright.
Now, “Action film from Netflix” doesn’t yet have the same run for the hills quality warning as “Science fiction film from Netflix”, although it’s getting down there. So, we trepidatiously approach Gunpowder Milkshake, in which we find Lena Headey’s Scarlet, an elite assassin for The Firm, having to go into hiding for mysterious reasons, leaving her daughter in the care of Paul Giamatti’s Nathan, her handler in that their Firm. Said daughter grows up to be Karen Gillan’s Sam, and like mother, like daughter.
However, spanners are interfaced with works when her last assignment goes south, with the son of a local crime outfit run by Ralph Ineson’s Jim McAlester getting a case of ballistic lead poisoning. This will soon catch up with Sam, but not before she’s told to track down and kill someone who stole money from the Firm. In the process of doing so, she’ll find out that the crime was done in order to pay his young daughter, Chloe Coleman’s Emily’s ransom to a bunch of kidnappers.
Sam goes off mission, deciding to rescue Emily, while the McAlester gang shake the Firm to the extent that they are happy to give up Sam in exchange for peace. Hence, a great amount of firepower is soon levelled at Sam, but she will receive some unexpected help from her returning mother, and her friends, Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett’s group of librarian assassins, I guess.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t dislike my time with Gunpowder Milkshake, which was an amiable enough watch as far as this sort of thing goes. I might even have felt a bit more receptive to it in a theoretical world where Nobody wasn’t released a few months back, or the John Wick films existed, or the John Woo heroic bloodshed films, but as it stands this just falls to the bottom of the pack. Maybe it’s also because it’s primary difference, gender aside, is the odd neon 50’s aesthetic it’s running with, which is stylising its violence into The Suicide Squad‘s territory, which did that better this very episode.
Headey and Gillen do well bouncing off each other and the supporting cast is adequately served – side note, it’s nice to see Giamatti again, sadly missed over the past, what, three years? Overall, I don’t have a great many complaints about the actors, but Navot Papushado’s script and direction is just a bit too try-hard for it’s own good. It results in a film that seems desperate to self identify as a cult classic, rather than get there organically, and is slightly repellant for that.
But only slightly, and that’s not quite enough to ruin it. If you are in the mood for a slice of stylised action, and if you’ve already seen the other similarly themed flicks aforementioned this won’t be an unpleasant watch, but that’s a pretty caveated recommendation at best. For more general audiences? Pass.