Netflix’s newest action-comedy-thriller-John Wick knockoff known as Gunpowder Milkshake can best be described like this: what if that one female-superheroes-assemble scene from Avengers: Endgame was expanded into a full 90-minute-long movie, starring one of the actors from that specific scene, incorporating plenty of A24-style lighting and featuring a cute kid for good measure? The simplicity and superficiality of this kind of “girlboss” energy is the fuel that drives this unnuanced, ungraceful, often uninteresting film. While there are brief delights and satisfying action sequences, numbness sets in like you’re actually drinking a milkshake.
A seemingly lab-grown, algorithm-assembled array of elements meant to please everyone, Gunpowder Milkshake boasts a solid cast, featuring Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Paul Giaatti, Carla Gugino, and Chloe Coleman, which significantly boosts the film’s quality. It’s decently funny at times, and there are plenty of thrilling action sequences, and the production design flickers between John Wick-ripoff and “A24 Does an Action Movie” collection, but is still passable because it’s so pleasing to look at. But it’s difficult to tell what Navot Papushado’s own directorial style might be like when Gunpowder Milkshake feels like a grab bag of other filmmakers’ quirks done for a simple cash-grab: Zack Snyder’s slow-motion tableau pans are mixed with Tarantino-style snap-zooms. Like so many recent action movies, Gunpowder Milkshake is hampered by an overzealous editing style that denies viewers the satisfaction of bodies in motion. And like so many recent movies aimed at a female audience, it’s full of feminist promises that wind up feeling extremely thin.
The film doesn’t entirely ignore the women-supporting-women cause. A mother protects her daughter, a twentysomething woman befriends and mentors a young girl, and three women gladly welcome back family members who left years before. But there’s no depth, and the script never digs into anything these characters have in common past their gender. Gunpowder Milkshake does the bare minimum, and although it makes some smart aesthetic choices, they don’t add up to the singularity that a familiar film like this requires. It opens with voiceover narration to introduce Sam (Gillan), an assassin who works for a powerful, all-male criminal organization known as the Firm. “They’ve been running things for a long, long time,” Sam says, and she and her handler Nathan (Giamatti) have been killing people for them for 15 years, since her mother Scarlet (Headey), also an assassin for the Firm, left her behind. Their rain-soaked, purple-lit parting took place at a diner Sam still frequents for its milkshakes after she murders her latest target, sews up her injuries, and further cultivates her terrifying reputation. But after a job goes wrong one night and she kills someone unexpected, her life begins to unravel.
Nathan tells her things can be set right if she tracks down a person who stole from the Firm, kills them, and gets the group’s money back. Over the course of maybe one night, maybe a couple of days — the film is unclear on this — Sam gets to it, but nothing is as simple as it seems. When she reconnects with “Librarians” (really just weaponeers and armorers) Madeleine (Carla Gugino), Anna (Angela Bassett), and Florence (Michelle Yeoh), they remind her of her childhood and her mother. So does Emily (Chloe Coleman), the daughter of one of Sam’s victims, who fills her with a sense of personal responsibility. With a target on her back, Sam needs to use all her shooting, slashing, stabbing, punching, kicking, and mixed-martial-arts skills to fight back against foes Jim (Ralph Ineson) and Virgil (Adam Nagaitis). “Just another day at the office,” she deadpans, but that isn’t quite true — especially not when her long-lost mother returns.
Between the MCU and the Jumanji remakes, Karen Gillan is now an action star. So why does she spend the entirety of this film doing a bad Uma Thurman impression instead of cultivating her own take on Sam? The film opens with a beautiful shot of a slash of red light illuminating only Sam’s eyes in a dark, blood-spattered apartment, but then its first 30 minutes or so drags because of the way Gillan mistakes stiffness for seriousness.
It doesn’t help that the tone of the script, co-written by director Papushado and Ehud Lavski, is all of over the place, demanding that goofy lines (“You haven’t even touched your milkshake!”) and phrases (guns referred to as “boomsticks” like in Evil Dead) be uttered with complete candor. And the urgency with which Gunpowder Milkshake wants to prove its feminist bona fides (Sam clarifying that she has no problems killing women, although the film never actually asks her to; the librarians loading her up with weapons hidden in books by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf; a villain complaining about his daughters) feels insincere, given that most of the film’s top-line crew are men.
Nevertheless, there are some thrills for those willing to ignore the tedium. A fight in a dentist’s office, with a gun and a scalpel taped to Sam’s hands as she whirls, spins, and takes on three baddies, takes its time capturing Gillan’s body, from her awkwardly efficient flailing to her split-second problem-solving. A car chase where Emily sits on Sam’s lap and helps her drive around a parking garage, zooming and drifting and reversing away from two cars of pursuers, is well-paced. And although the major mid-film fight scene suffers from such jarring editing that even Michael Bay might say, “Hey, guys, cool it,” the final third of Gunpowder Milkshake absolutely improves when Headey, Gugino, Bassett, and Yeoh have more screen time. Their screen presences are so unique, and their comedic timing is so good (Yeoh’s droll “it’s a tooth” when she pulls something out of her hair) that they somewhat balance the film’s other disappointing elements.
Do they redeem a bizarre ending that unnecessarily absolves Sam of any wrongdoing, but of course leaves open room for a sequel? They do not. But when Gunpowder Milkshake has so few successes, Headey’s half-smirk, Bassett’s exasperated line deliveries, Gugino’s set jaw as she steps behind a mounted machine gun, and Yeoh’s effortlessly cool eyepatch-wearing will have to do.
2/5 STARS