Mark Reviews Movies: GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2021

Screenwriters Navot Papushado, who also directed, and Ehud Lavski do create a strange, quirky world in Gunpowder Milkshake. It's a criminal underworld, where a shadowy organization oversees all, where assassins find refuge in a 1950s-style diner, and where the books in a library contain no information but plenty of weapons and ammunition.

As we see more of this world, though, the less considered and developed it seems to be. The filmmakers have nailed the ornamentation. They just skimped on the foundation.

That approach carries through the rest of this movie, too, which, despite its shortcomings, is admirably stylish and straight-to-the-point. A woman, the daughter of a professional assassin, is a hired killer whose conscience awakens on a particular mission, making her the target of all sorts of enemies and supposed allies. The thin plot is mostly an excuse to put the protagonist in peril, as she fights and shoots her way through foe after foe and then, with a few real partners, through wave after wave of baddies.

The plot, in other words, doesn't matter, and to their credit, Papushado and Lavski know this and proceed accordingly. If the plot isn't important, the action certainly is, and some of it—particularly one shootout/brawl about midway through the movie—is brutally, stylishly, and even ingeniously staged. If the plot is knowingly disposable and the action is mostly effective, is that enough?

There's no real equation to figure out the answer to that question, but if one were to attempt to do such a calculation, the payoff of the action here isn't quite enough to excuse how thin everything else—the plot, the characters, the world-building—in this movie is. The filmmakers have given us the pieces of something potentially unique—all of those aforementioned elements—without expanding upon them enough to make them such.

The professional killer is Sam (Karen Gillan, who isn't asked to do much with the role but does bring to it a convincing physicality and no-nonsense manner), whom we first meet finishing a hit, before she's unexpectedly ambushed by a platoon of armed goons. Off-screen, Sam defeats them all, with only a scratch to show for the unseen effort.

At a safe house styled after an old-fashioned diner, Sam's boss Nathan (Paul Giamatti), the head of human resources for a criminal organization called "the Firm," offers some bad news. One of the people she killed in that ambush was the son of a major underworld heavy (played by Ralph Ineson), and he wants to kill her. She has one final chance to make things right with the Firm: to retrieve some money that one of the organization's members stole. When the thief reveals that he stole the cash in order to pay the ransom for his abducted daughter Emily (Chloe Coleman), Sam decides to risk her life in order to rescue the girl.

The rest of the plot, of course, has Sam confronting, evading, and/or fighting the kidnappers, the Firm's hired goons, and members of the vengeance-seeking mobster's gang. Before that, there's some back story for Sam, whose mother Scarlet (Lena Headey) abandoned her 15 years prior, after killing the man who murdered her husband and Sam's father. The mother returns, obviously, to help Sam out of her increasing problems.

In addition to the diner, we're introduced to some other intriguing locales. The big ones are a secret hospital, with long hallways and cramped examination rooms only baring a bright and sterile white paint job, and an ornate library, where hollowed-out books, guarded by a trio of "librarians," hold everything a hired assassin could want or need. Those librarians, by the way, are played by Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett, all of whom—like Gillan and Headey—excel at the tough, curt attitude that defines just about every character here.

There are fights and gun battles and chases in these places, as well as others—a drowned-in-neon bowling, an abandoned mall, a parking garage. A couple of those action sequences are effective enough, such as the way Sam takes down a trio of the Firm's goons in the bowling joint, using their own weapons and the alley's heavy balls against them.

One of the sequences, which is set at the hospital, is especially inventive, as Sam has to take on the same trio (all sporting various injuries), only without the use of her arms, which have been paralyzed. The ensuing fight, in which our protagonist has to employ the centrifugal force of her torso to make use of a knife and a pistol (each taped to either hand), is patently ridiculous and particularly inspired, and a proceeding cat-and-mouse game in a car is almost as clever.

Following that, Papushado and Lavski, unfortunately, seem to run out of ideas, both in terms of the action and the story. In the case of the former, the filmmakers assume that more—the mother-and-daughter duo and the librarians taking on goon after goon in bloody combat—is better. It only seems predictable and repetitive, though, after we've seen them do more—and much better—with less. As for the plot, characters, and world of Gunpowder Milkshake, we're just left wanting more from all of them.

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