3+1 Short Paragraphs: Gunpowder Milkshake

 2021, Navot Papushado (Rabies) -- Netflix

There is always those posts about movies that I truly enjoyed, that I want to jump into writing, and once I get there, I find I have nothing to say that gives it credit where due. Over there, just above, or long after, there is a post about the Fear Street trilogy of teen horror movies that is stalled in drafts. So, instead I jump to my To-Be's and find something I was disappointed in. It just seems easier to write when I dislike something or almost dislike-something.

Gunpowder Milkshake is a movie that in promo, I thought I will enjoy. It's a Women With Guns tag flick, it's in the head-canon-universe that spawns John Wick, it's violent and colourful and creative. Too bad it was just so bloody boring. It's not hard to see what Papushado was going for, and its all up there on the screen, it just seems too disjointed, constantly tonally shifting, too Jackson Pollock in approach, without the proven skill. Too bad.

I like Karen Gillen, but I don't think she's a good actor. She shouts at the screen, but that's fine, she can find her niche and play it through. Gun toting assassins is not that niche. She is the daughter of an assassin, one who abandoned her in a picturesque American 50s style diner. Instead of running away from her mom's legacy, out of resentment and anger, she became one, working for the exact people who drove her mother away. And then, like her mother did, she kills the wrong guy, and is put on the hit list and the bad guys send EVERYONE to kill her. She finds support and solace with the Library, this world's sort of The Continental, but a library that hides guns in books because... well, someone thinks its cool, I guess?

In this movie you can see hints of John Wick, comic booky action from Sin City, sexy women killing people in slo-mo ala Sucker Punch. The acting is on-point kitschy, the styles and colours all crisp, the world otherworldly, just like I like it, but the pacing was off and I found myself yawning metaphorically. And yet, not truly hating it. Any movie with Lena Headey, Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino, and Angela Basset all playing bad-asses cannot be that bad. But it should have been so much more, instead of just being a decent effort.