I subscribe to a number of streaming services, and each of them has a watchlist, and HBO Max seems to be the only one with a subsection to tell me what movies are leaving the service by the end of a given month. As such, that may be the only watchlist that actually gets, you know, viewed all that often. So, every so often, I figure I should knock something off one of the other lists, and there may be none longer than my current Netflix watchlist. As it is, Gunpowder Milkshake looked pretty cool, and I do tend to like actress Karen Gillan in stuff. So, this one sure looked promising if nothing else.
I mean, I’d probably at least find it as memorable as Army of the Dead.
In an unnamed city controlled by The Firm, Sam (Gillan) is the one who gets called in when someone needs to be taken care of, potentially with violence. That appears to be the same position her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey) held while Sam was growing up, but Scarlet had to leave town in a hurry when Sam was about 12, and the two have not seen each other since. Sam has enough problems when her last job left a lot of corpses, but she has another one. An accountant for the Firm’s legal side embezzled a sizable amount of cash, and Sam needs to retrieve it. However, the accountant (Samuel Anderson) took the money to pay a ransom for his young daughter Emily (Chloe Coleman). Unfortunately, the accountant is fatally injured, and Sam takes it upon herself to use the Firm’s money to rescue the girl, planning to get it all back after the exchange. Too bad the higher ups at the Firm instruct Sam’s contact Nathan (Paul Giamatti) to do something about that because Sam just went too far. With an angry mob boss (Ralph Ineson) sending his underlings after Sam to get even for the death of his son at her hands and the Firm no longer protecting her, Sam will need to find some help if she wants to get herself and Emily out of all this alive.
By the by, that basic plot set-up is not even getting into the all-around weirdness of this movie. This is a movie where libraries stock weapons inside of books and 50s style diners are neutral territory. Dentists do underworld surgery. And everything is colored in the brightest of possible hues. If nothing else, this is a memorable movie to look at.
Unfortunately, that look is about all the movie seems to have going for it. It’s weird, but never feels like it has any real substance. At one point, Sam gets into a fight with three hitmen in a bowling alley. And while the fight has some cool moves, none of the hits seem to be landing all that hard. It looked a lot like, well, a pretend fight. A later fight with the same trio while Sam is partially incapacitated is perhaps intended to be maybe played for laughs as she can only do so much and the three men are high on laughing gas instead comes across as, for lack of a better term, too much. This is a movie with a lot of style that doesn’t seem to have nearly as much substance.
That’s too bad. Gillan is a charming performer in her own right as seen in the new Jumanji movies. But then there’s the rest of the cast, including Headey, Carla Gugino, Angela Basset, and Michelle Yeoh are a group of badass librarian/assassins to say nothing of Giamatti in another variation on his harried middle manager character type. The women especially acquit themselves well in their scenes, but as with everything else in this movie, there never seems to be any weight to what’s going on. That may have been intentional, but perhaps, like Sam’s preferred beverage, the whole movie is little better than a milkshake: it tastes good, but there isn’t much to it in the form of nutrition.
Grade: C
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