(we agree-ish) Gunpowder Milkshake

 2021, d. Navot Papushado - netflix

This is a rare film that has a pretty weak first act but gets far better in its second and third acts.

I've had a wee li'l crush on Karen Gillen since her first scene in the first episode of the Matt Smith run on Doctor Who.  She's charming.  Toast, in his review, questions if she's a good actress, and I don't ever doubt that (and it's not crush goggle blindness, she's very talented.  I think her performance as Nebula is probably the best in the very stacked Avengers: Endgame).  But she has comfort zones and sometimes it takes time for her to find them.  

The first act here needs to establish her character, Sam, as a ruthlessly efficient hitman/hitwoman/hitperson, one who is completely able to disassociate herself from her violent actions and the pain they cause (including the injuries she sustains).  Sam suffers from abandonment issues after her mother, a top tier hitman (let's just say "hitman" is a gender agnostic term), killed the wrong person and went on the run without her when Sam was a teenager.  I'm not sure that I buy it, not at this stage, and certainly not in how the film sets her up with an off-screen fight and too, too many hyper-stylized shots that look like cut scenes from Sin City. 

But on a character level, Sam's abandonment completely informs her.  Perhaps in trying to understand her mother, Sam dove into the same profession, and worked to be even better than her mother was, and succeeded.  But tasked with recovering a bag of stolen money for "The Firm", she gets a little too trigger happy and kills a desperate man who is just trying to save his daughter after she had been kidnapped.  Sam takes it upon herself to rescue the kidnapped 8 1/2-year-old, in the process losing the Firm's money.  Also unknown to Sam is she's killed the son of a mob boss, an associate of the Firm, and they cut her loose.  Suddenly she's able to relate to her mother's predicament.  But it should be noted the "killing the wrong guy" is independent of her losing the money, and it's one layer too thick in the story.  These should be connected, like maybe one of The Firm's mooks is the mob boss' kid instead of being a part of an unrelated arc.

The first act doesn't really start working until Sam meets Emily (Chloe Coleman), the young girl.  Coleman is a very intuitive young actress, while not always note perfect, reads her scenes well.  Gillen has good interplay with her and Sam's connection to the girl she orphaned is palpable.  The connection between Gillen and her handler, Nathan (played by Paul Giamatti), isn't well met.  We're meant to understand that after she was abandoned, Nathan took Sam in and raised here, but their familiarity is very loose, and it would have worked more had they played into some form of emotional bond (especially when there's betrayal).  The film really gets clicking at the start of the second act when Sam meets her mother again for the first time, and the interplay between Lena Hedy, Gillen and Coleman is especially sweet.

The first major action set piece in the bowling alley (as immaculately lit in neon as it is) is really, really bad.  It was a dire portent of things to come, which, thankfully never manifested.  Visually the sequence is awful to watch.  There's speed ramping used to make it look like the fight is happening faster than it is, but even still the clunky choreography is all too exposed.  I'm not certain why it was allowed to be in this film in its current state, execpt for the fact that it fully informs the next fight sequence which is quite entertaining.

In this second sequence, Sam once again meets the goons she beat up in the bowling alley, only this time they're in the underworld hospital.  The doctor, working with the battered goons, numbs both of Sam's arms so she can't hold a weapon, and once she's semi-incapacitated the goons can set upon her.  Sam has Emily tape a gun in one hand, and scalpel in the other and she sets about fighting a guy on crutches, a guy in a wheelchair and a guy in an arm cast in a ludicrous hallway action sequence.  If this doesn't play to its fullest potential, it's because the performers playing the goons are...well, too much like human versions of the Mon-stars from Space Jam.  Just unbelievable even for this over-the-top reality.

The Library is a setting that is meant to be a world unto itself.  Each book on the shelf contains... something other than words.  Guns, gold, money.  It's impractical, an the film doesn't do the best job at defining what its role is in this world-at-large, but if it's awesome, it's because of who runs it... Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett... and, wow, are they styling highly, yes!

[Let me just pause and restate that this film has Karen Gillen, Lena Hedy, Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett in it...together, and they all get to kick some ass.  Is it the best possible use of this quintet of Kent crushes from across the past 30 years?  Sadly, no, but I can't help but be enthused by what's here.] 

The big battle in the Library is completely perfunctory, but it's an absolutely highlight, if anything showing that Michelle Yeoh is still a phenomenal action star.  But the opening moment of the fight with Hedy leaping over the reception table, flinging two guns forward, is utterly badass.

The narrative weight  put into the estranged mother-daughter relationship, as well as the guilt Sam has over Emily's father's death, but unable to ignore the connection she has with both of them fuels the film in the second and third act.  I was very much invested in these connections, and could see how they were reshaping Sam (it is a good performance from Gillen).  The characters (and performances) really connect, and the themes of parenting and abandonment are unexpectedly resonant.  I wasn't expecting any emotional core of of this all-girl John Wick knock-off.

Now, that all said, I do want to like this more than I actually do.  I wish Gunpowder Milkshake were firing within me the desire to rewatch it over and over, but it doesn't inspire me much.  I wanted more out of this, particularly more out of Yeoh, Bassett and Gugino.  I mean, I think we got more out of them than just the glorified cameo I had expected, but even still I want more.  It's a little muddy but I think that Bassett and Hedy were in a relationship before Hedy disappeared, and that Yeoh and Gugino are partners as well.  It's there, but it's not there enough.  I want these characters and their relationships to be more developed.

 Perhaps one of the key elements it was missing was a score that I would want to listen to apart from the film.   What we have here for the score is a spaghetti western pastiche that really, really didn't work for me.  It felt like Dollar Store Morricone, and didn't fit the vibe.  As well, some of the music cues were too on the nose, although some are kind of inspired, like a surprise Stereolab insert.