Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Sam (Karen Gillan) is working for some sort of criminal organization known as The Firm as a hit woman. As all professional killers do, she has a tragic past. Namely, her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey), who also worked as a killer for The Firm, disappeared fifteen years ago, never to be heard from or seen again.

Sam also has the career typical weakness for children (and perhaps the blind, too, though she doesn’t encounter any blind person during the course of the movie, thus I can’t say for sure), so when her newest victim turns out to have a little daughter (Chloe Coleman), she starts on the mandated way of protection, a way which will also lead to some surprising reunions and point towards methods to reconcile herself with her past.

On the way lie many dead thugs, a family reunion, and three awesome aunts -  librarians, traders in weapons and killers played by Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett.

Navot Papushado’s action comedy (with heavier emphasis on the action) Gunpowder Milkshake is one of those post-ironic, trope conscious movies that never quite seems to want to deconstruct the genre it is working in, making friendly nods and a couple of snarky remarks about the genre conventions it uses but also showing no shame nor embarrassment using them. Which is more than fine with me, seeing as this leads to a movie that seldom feels the need to congratulate itself for its cleverness, nor one that confuses small twists and turns in genre conventions with revolutionary acts. Rather, it uses its small changes and twists as more satisfying ways to fulfil genre expectations, finding the sweet spot where self-consciousness does not turn into self-(or genre-)loathing. Gunpowder Milkshake even does direct quotes from a panoply of classic genre movies well, again using little twists into the right directions to make even those things that aren’t exactly its own, very much its own indeed.

So, like this year’s other, even better, big female-centric action movie Black Widow, the film can be relaxed enough to treat the existence of its female action heroes as a matter of course, celebrating their awesomeness by also making it normal. This doesn’t preclude some mainstream feminist elements, but rather strengthens them by anchoring them in a world where a woman doing action hero things is the new normal and doesn’t need explanation or male approval anymore. Which to my eyes isn’t just all kinds of cool but also a pretty inclusive and practical way to move forward.

Of course, it does help the film’s project that Gillan’s has gotten rather great at that action movie star thing and comports herself very well in the action, the comedy and the drama bits of whatever she is given. She is also assisted by co-stars from a couple of generations before who are all actresses active in various genre spaces only an incel won’t love already, which offhandedly turns this into a film that celebrates some great actresses who have been paving the way for women in genre as a normality for decades.

Gunpowder Milkshake is aesthetically a pleasure, too, mixing super-stylized colour schemes and production design to enable less realistic and therefore more cool action, admitting many a silly and cheesy idea, and staging all of it – with this again wonderfully keeping in genre traditions – with increasing verve and style. There’s also a willingness to be weird on display that parallels the worldbuilding of the John Wick films, but in a way that feels less showy and more organic to me. You can insert my usual sarcastic remarks about Keanu here, too – Gillan and co are certainly the superior action actors (less flailing of arms etc).

In other words: it’s fun, not stupid, and looks great, too.

Faster (2010)

Freshly released from prison, a man (Dwayne “The Rock Johnson”) – let’s call him Driver – starts killing the people who stole the loot and killed his partners after a successful bank robbery. Driver not actually being a professional criminal, his thirst for vengeance has nothing at all to do with money but with the little fact that one of his murdered partners was his brother, and his murder, as much as the others, absolutely unnecessary. Because Driver’s way of killing people is pretty damn straightforward, the police – in form of a straight professional (Carla Gugino) and drug addicted trouble magnet (Billy Bob Thornton) – are soon on his case. To make things more difficult, there’s also a pretentious hitman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) hired by whoever was actually responsible for the death of Driver’s brother on Driver’s case.

I found George Tillman Jr.’s Faster a somewhat frustrating viewing experience, not because it is a bad movie but because it is indeed a very good movie that suffers from one or two serious missteps that keep it away from being actually brilliant; missteps which seem utterly pointless, too.

First and foremost, there’s the sub-plot about Jackson-Cohen’s killer and his girlfriend (professional daughter and girlfriend) Maggie Grace that seems to have no business being in the movie at all. As characters, the couple seems to come directly out of one of those horrible would-be Tarantino movies (you know, the kind that doesn’t actually get how and why Tarantino's films and characters work, or are too lazy to put the work in). Worse, the hitman and his character arc have little – if any at all – business in a film about vengeance, redemption and forgiveness, seeing as he never does anything redemptive, doesn’t forgive, and isn’t involved in any vengeance. Plus, despite time spent on the killer couple that could have been used more fruitfully on characters that actually have fuck all to do with the rest of the film, the characters stay flat, unbelievable and just painfully uninteresting.

Which is particularly irritating in a film that otherwise shows a particular ability of drawing its minor characters with a strong hand, building on clichés instead of just using them, and easily showing everything you could want to know about a character in a five minute confrontation with Driver. The film’s protagonist is a a vehicle to reveal something about the nature of guilt, and the complexity of it, in others as well as in himself, here.

It does of course help that this is a film that casts actors like Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje or Jennifer Carpenter for these small but extremely important roles, actors willing and able to actually go beyond the cliché and suggest complexities in their characters the film then doesn’t need to explain in excruciating detail and flashbacks.

Speaking of acting, Johnson also shows himself to be perfectly capable of more than just looking angry or tense (though he’s really good at that) but actually gives his characters nuance through body language and looks. While I had already come to the conclusion he’s a better screen presence than most other acting wrestlers, his performance here is convincing enough I can’t help but see him as an actor from here on out, and not a wrestler playing at acting.

Tillman’s direction for its part, while suffering a bit from a case of The Yellow, is tight, focused, and, when it doesn’t waste time on the hitman, decidedly on the intelligent side, giving the shoot-outs and the violence the right amount of excitement but really emphasising characters, and the emotional and moral impact of vengeance.

And while you might think there’s not much new or interesting to say about vengeance, redemption, or the decision to forgive, Faster actually does. Or rather, the film actually places these things in a much better and more complex context than most films concerned with these things do, realizing the deed that drives one character to vengeance will be what turns the life of one or more of the people who had committed that deed around, also realizing that this doesn’t undo anything yet also understanding that undoing horrible things is neither the point of vengeance nor that of forgiveness. And while it’s at it, Faster also does subtle, clever things like insinuating that the guy who ruined your life might just be another poor, weak asshole who can’t seem to make the right decision.

Which is quite a bit of interesting stuff to find in a film that might have turned out to be just another flick about some beefed-up dude taking vengeance on bad guys.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,crime,george tillman jr.,dwayne johnson,billy bob thornton,carla gugino

Three Films Make A Post: Monsters walk the Earth in a ravishing rampage of clawing fury!

Watchmen (Ultimate Cut) (2009): I know, as a good little nerd I'm bound by law to hate Zack Snyder and everything he has ever done with an intensity sane people reserve for guys who eat babies, or are Hitler, but I just don't. In fact, I think Snyder's highly artificial and operatic version of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen ain't half bad. Often, the film nearly manages to reach the heights its aiming for with its choice of source, at other times, it gets bogged down in slight bloat or is trying to stay so close to surface elements of the comic that it's veering into the territory of the unintentionally comical, but the latter does come with a territory as inherently ridiculous as the superhero genre (that I love just as much as Snyder seems to do).

In other words, I think Watchmen is a perfectly fine film.

 

I.K.U. (2000): Taiwanese-American arthouse director Shu Lea Cheang made this hard softcore low budget movie in Japan with a predominantly Japanese cast and crew, and it's pretty much like an outsider's dream of what a Japanese cyber-porn movie would look like. There is some sort of story about a sex-data collecting android called Reiko in there, but Cheang seems more interested in burying it under every cheap visual trick you can afford when you're producing your movie digitally. The whole film works inside of the stylistic parameters of Japanese low-budget cyberpunk films like Tetsuo, just with sex taking the place of the violence, and gender- and sexual fluidity that of less precisely located bodily transformations. Like its predecessors, it'll either give you a headache from exposure to too much visual and audial information in too little time, or make you quite happy in its own psychedelic way.

 

Drive Angry (2011): Well, depending on your preferences, this charming little ditty about Nic Cage crawling from hell to save his baby granddaughter and driving, angry, is either the End of Western Civilization made film or an adorable attempt at making a movie that is exactly like an old grindhouse film without even a hint of the intelligence other lovers of the form like Rodriguez and Tarantino apply to it.

Being who I am, I'm obviously pretty alright with both interpretations. What's not to love about a film featuring Nicolas Cage grimacing and mumbling, Amber Heard perfectly emulating all the sexy good-naturedness of 70s exploitation heroines who deserved better than their filmic surroundings gave them, William Fichtner doing his best Christopher Walken impression, random nudity, horrible jokes, and a bit of the old ultra violence set to generic rock music?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,superheroes,action,pinku,horror,zack snyder,nicolas cage,amber heard,shu lea cheang,jackie earle haley,jeffrey dean morgan,carla gugino,stephen mchattie