I was looking forward to Gunpowder Milkshake. Sure, there hasn’t really been a truly great John Wick knock-off yet. But look at that cast! Karen Gillan, Doctor Who‘s most successful breakout star, plays our gun-toting heroine. Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett play the assistants helping equip her. Paul Giamatti plays a Firm heavy managing her hits. Beyond the cast, it’s clear from even in the trailer that the film clearly has a strong sense of style.
And yet, Gunpowder Milkshake came and went without a blip. It appeared without fanfare on Netflix, and then disappeared into its vast ocean of Content. This review is so late because I genuinely didn’t notice it got released at all. Its critical consensus was rough, and fan reaction wasn’t much stronger. All in all, Gunpowder Milkshake just… didn’t really work for most folks. Why is that?
“I’m embarrassed to say it’s been some time since I visited a library.”
Sam (Karen Gillan) is an assassin. She kills for ‘The Firm’, a cabal of rich and powerful men who sometimes need to protect their business rather forcefully. But after a hit goes bad and she kills the son of a crime lord, Sam is on thin ice. Her handler, Nathan (Paul Giamatti), has taken on a fatherly role to her, and he gives her another chance.
She promptly breaks through that ice when she realizes that her latest target was trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter. She takes his mission as her own, retrieving his daughter, and breaking all bounds with the Firm as she does so.
Now Sam, accompanied by Emily (Chloe Coleman), has to survive a night with all the forces of the Firm breathing down her neck. To up her odds, she enlists a trio of ‘librarians’ (Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino) who run a secret library that keeps assassins well-armed. Together, these women try to withstand the full force of the Firm.
“Well, that’s no way to live, dear.”
Where did Gunpowder Milkshake go wrong? The answer is simple: Gunpowder Milkshake wants to be funny, and writer/director Navot Papushado is not terribly good at comedy. Well, okay, conceptually, he’s not bad at comedy at all. There are some really solid gags in here, if I’m being honest. They just don’t really land. He and editor Nicolas De Toth linger where they shouldn’t. The timing is off. It reminds me a little bit of the (much, much worse) Postal. The sole solid ‘bit’ in that movie, a shootout that inexplicably seems to only claim children as victims, is undone by shoddy pacing of reveals. That happens here over and over again.
For instance, one early-film action sequence finds Karen Gillan with numb arms fighting three seriously wounded goons jumped up on laughing gas. Gillan’s arms are numbed, so she’s had a knife and a gun taped to her hands. The henchmen are all in varying stages of disrepair. What follows is four profoundly injured people throwing themselves slowly into what becomes a shockingly brutal melee. The film wants this to land as a joke, but it can’t commit to the distance or patience it needs to do so. Shots of them limping into battle are cut short. In the end, all that remains is a slower-than-expected action scene.
The best action-comedies — 21 and 22 Jump Street, Game Night, or The Nice Guys, to toss off some recent examples — manage to keep the pace tight, gags landing where bullets should and vice versa. The moments of violence in those films are simultaneously shocking and funny. The comedy is driven by the characters. But, inspired by John Wick, Karen Gillan is playing this completely deadpan. There’s no peccadilloes to her character that might lend themselves towards comedy. So we’re dependent on the world to provide it. And here’s where we return to Navot Papushado and Nicolas De Toth simply… not really knowing how to pace comedy.
In one scene, you have the librarians arming Sam, handing her ‘books’ that all hide guns within them. You can see the joke coming a mile away: Here’s a book-gun, here’s a book-gun, here’s… just a good book! Edgar Wright has made a career out of landing jokes like this, quick cuts and pared-down editing letting the movie move faster than your brain. Gunpowder Milkshake lingers on these moments. By the time the joke hits, you’ve moved on. The joke limps past the finish line and collapses at your feet. It took so long to arrive you almost forgot it was coming.
“Let’s get you into a good book.”
Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t a disaster. This is no Polar. It’s just also… not great? Karen Gillan’s straight-faced, no-nonsense assassin fits in well in the John Wick mold, but Gunpowder Milkshake lacks that film’s viscerally impactful brutality, its spare storytelling. Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett are also playing quite deadpan here. Honestly, so are most of the villains. This means that Papushado is entirely dependent on external elements for the comedy. At no point does he make an effort to integrate that comedy into the film itself.
And yet, is there another film out there where you can see Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett team up to fight gangsters with hammers and chains? Gunpowder Milkshake falters in its execution, certainly, but there’s definitely something there. I watched the film nearly two weeks ago, and some of the action setpieces, in particular a few of the visual stylings of those bits, stick with me. The bowling alley fight scene looks fantastic. The fight choreography and aesthetics of the film are largely rock solid. But half-baked comedy undermines the film’s best elements at every turn.