Decidedly a disappointment.
No one is asking for opinions about Netflix movies. By virtue of their status as Netflix movies, they are meant to go uncriticized and unexamined like an abandoned mine or a sneeze, holding the same illusion of depth or sudden, fleeting moment of suspense. When you spend billions of dollars a year trying to convince people to continue to renew subscriptions, a lot of what you make is there to tick a few boxes with a very narrow set of demographics. If I had to peg this movie’s target audience, I’d say it’s people who love Karen Gillan but also felt like they didn’t get enough mom vibes out of her. It’s for fans of Widows (2018) or The Kitchen (2019) that wanted a little less story and a lot more guns, but not too much guns, also fights with knives and sledge hammers and stuff.
Actually, in terms of kindred spirit movies, I kind of feel like Free Fire (2016) is a good contender, mostly because of the way that it was billed as a rollicking violent blood spray of a movie starring some wonderful actors, including one Brie Larson hot off of her Oscar for Room (if I recall correctly). I remember that movie having some high hopes and disappointing as small in scope and ambitions, aside from being pretty stupid. I didn’t think that I would have to reach back to that movie ever again and yet here I am, remembering it fondly in comparison to what I just watched. That’s the magic of a Netflix movie. It can make you yearn for movies you’d completely rejected as hot garbage.
I wrote some notes down, but in no particular order, here are some of the things that make Gunpowder Milkshake not worth your time or attention. So, the basic premise is that a young assassin botches a job by saving a young girl, inadvertently starting a war between crime families, and then attracting the attention of a group of women gunslingers. Wife said, “Are you watching Leon the Professional? Because that’s basically the premise of Leon the Professional.” So I guess that’s your next stop instead of this movie. The premise of this movie is gold. I think that You Were Never Really Here has a lot of the same elements of plot without as much of the bullets, and still does a lovely job. So the problems with this movie aren’t necessarily the simplicity or outlandishness of the plot. They’re subtler forms of stupid.
Subtle stupidity like the running gag in which the cabal of all-women gunslingers run a major public library branch in which all of its books are filled with guns and explosives or bars of gold and wads of cash. The cash is colorful, so it’s not America, but basically every person in this movie has decided to choose a different accent. The movie bears some resemblance to Hotel Artemis in that respect, timeless, universal, divorced from location or culture, for fear of having to be just a little specific. I think that this movie may have borrowed the elevator from Artemis as well.
Anyway, luckily, no one but people who want to “exchange books” comes into this library, which, by the by, is not what you do at libraries to begin with. If you went into a library and brought a bag of books and asked the library to exchange them, that librarian would tell you to fuck right off. Instead, these librarians bring Karen Gillan down to their inner sanctum and fit her with a new set of books from the trailer with ironic classic titles that are actually kind of cool. Jane Austen seems like it’s gonna be an awesome gun, but Gillan never really grows an attachment to any of her guns, and the association with the book seems to be pretty superficial, which makes sense, because the movie, despite being a slog of two hours, isn’t deep.
The book euphemism is annoyingly not followed consistently throughout the movie. At one point, when the librarians are handing Lena Headley her favorite guns, they open up a gun case. A lot of the things they put into their getaway van at the bottom of the library are decidedly not books, and they drift in and out of describing the guns as books throughout the film. The fact that the books are all filled with weapons is important(ish) later at the end of this movie when the Big Plan is apparently to lure the bad guys to what appears to be neutral territory, the diner from the beginning of the movie where Lena Headley shoots a bunch of Russian mobsters in the head despite the fact that the rule is that there are no guns allowed there. The chief virtue of the diner appears to be that it’s a safe place–for women assassins to bend the rules of the assassins guilds and kill whoever they want with discretion. By the way, the Russian mobster in the first scene also brings his gun in, so for a neutral zone, it’s pretty shit at enforcing its policy, which makes sense considering they basically have a middle aged waitress check your gun at the door.
Oh, also, because I’m paying attention to these things right now for other projects, don’t miss the part where one of the librarians lynches a henchman with chains while another librarian, who is black, walks by and doesn’t bat an eye. It’s pretty unnecessary, but also is this a thing that happens? Do black heroes just have to tolerate when their colleagues commit racialized forms of violence around them?
To end, the movie’s decision to enshroud its ensemble women in plot armor is fine, but it makes for some conscious aesthetic decisions about the way that combat looks in the film. Much like in Birds of Prey, our audience has some major attachment issues with all of the ensemble, so all the fight scenes have to look like choreographed dances–something I’ve surely written about before. We don’t really worry about Karen Gillan in her fights (see also, The Sisters Brothers, which does this in really fun ways that make us appreciate not just their prowess, but also makes us feel their grief about taking so much life) and she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about the lives she’s taken, because she finds them to be justified. But the film spends a lot of time painting the walls with bullets, which isn’t very interesting to watch. Karen Gillan has some of the coolest fight scenes in the first hour of this movie, especially when she’s basically fighting like a jellyfish in a hospital Guns Akimbo-style. Even her brawl with three dudes in the bowling alley is pretty awesome, although more often than not the setting of the fights has little to no bearing on the way that anyone fights.
Steer clear of this movie and its pretty neon lights. It is lying to you.
