Gunpowder Milkshake

The main selling points for this entertaining if formulaic action comedy are its inventive fight sequences and its great cast, who make this film far more fun that it would have been in lesser hands.

Premise: When Sam (Karen Gillan), an assassin working for the all-powerful “Firm”, botches a job, she finds herself on the run with an 8-year-old girl, and with no one to turn to except her mother (Lena Headey) who abandoned her 15 years ago (and who was also an assassin), and the mysterious “librarians” (Carla Gugino, Angela Bassett and Michelle Yeoh).

Review:

The best thing about Gunpowder Milkshake (other than its deliciously evocative title) is its cast. Karen Gillan is great in arguably her first major leading role, and she brings her trademarked combination of deadpan humour, buttoned-down emotion and kickass action to her portrayal of Sam, a lonely assassin who fell into “the life” after her mother abandoned her 15 years ago. Karen Gillan carries the entire film, to such an extent that the character who gets the next most screen time is probably the relative unknown Chloe Coleman, who plays the child that Sam vows to protect. Karen Gillan’s natural charisma and dark sense of humour distracts from the underwritten nature of her character, and she’s completely credible in all of the (many) action sequences.

The rest of the cast may not get nearly as much to do, but it’s still a lot of fun to see them all on screen together in such a ridiculously over-the-top action comedy. Lena Headey balances the humour and the action well in her role as Sam’s estranged mother, Scarlet, who’s also a master assassin, even if the more emotional moments feel a little undercooked. Meanwhile, seeing screen legends Carla Gugino, Angela Bassett and Michelle Yeoh together as a bizarre secret sisterhood of weapon dealers is fantastic, and they’re all clearly having a lot of fun playing such no-holds-barred badasses.

“…the creative fight sequences do things I’ve never seen in an action film before...”

Meanwhile, Michael Smiley has a fun cameo as an underworld doctor, and Game of Thrones actor Ralph Ineson appears as the head of a rival criminal organisation also out for Sam’s head. In fact, it’s probably just Paul Giamatti who doesn’t get much to do in his role as Nathan, Sam’s handler at the Firm and her adoptive father-figure following her mother’s disappearance. (It also feels like there’s a massive plot hole connected to something his character does partway through the film, but that’s another matter).

After the cast, the next best thing about Gunpowder Milkshake are the action sequences. In an action comedy like this, you either need to be laugh-out-loud funny, or you need to have genuinely inventive action sequences – Gunpowder Milkshake is rarely laugh-out-loud funny (although it did put a smile on my face several times), but it does have some very creative fight sequences. I don’t want to give away too much, but the highlights for me (certainly in terms of combining original fight choreography with a dark sense of humour) were the action sequences which take place in a clinic and in a bowling alley, both of which did things I’ve never seen in an action film before. The finale, while perhaps not quite as inventive, was still immense fun, primarily because it provided all of the cast with at least one cool action moment for their show reel.

“…an enjoyably stylised, over-the-top action flick with a great cast & inventive action sequences…”

Gunpowder Milkshake is a film that has some great elements (namely the cast and the action), but arguably not a lot else. The plot is incredibly formulaic with no real surprises, and the direction feels very mundane and pedestrian for the most part (although the direction during the action scenes avoids the cliché of too many fast cuts, and the longer cuts do show off the fight choreography quite nicely). Most of the characters feel underdeveloped (they’re really concepts more than they are characters), and as a result, the more emotional beats in the movie don’t really land. The tone of the film also feels a little all over the place, at times (certainly near the beginning) it feels like it’s trying to evoke a heightened, neo-noir, hard-boiled gumshoe vibe with Sam’s character, but at other times it’s so ridiculously stylised and over-the-top it almost feels like a parody, and then at other times it almost feels like it wants to be taken more seriously.

It’s this lack of consistent tone, more than anything else, that means Gunpowder Milkshake will never reach the mythology-building heights of the John Wick series, which have always had a very clear sense of their own identity. A flimsy plot is perhaps easier to forgive when the cast and action are this good, but the muddled tone is more of an issue. But ultimately, if you go into this looking for an enjoyably stylised, over-the-top action flick with a great cast and inventive action sequences – nothing more, nothing less – you hopefully won’t be disappointed.