Review: Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)
Dammit, it’s good, but it should have been great!
Sam (Karen Gillan) is a hitman for the Firm, ie. the Patriarchy (they’re not being subtle about it), just as her mother (Lena Heady) was before she had to go on the run fifteen years earlier after pulling a trigger she shouldn’t have pulled. Sam is the best, of course, but when she tries to do the right thing on a mission, things go South and she is left to care for eight-year-old Emily (Chloe Coleman) while fighting off, well, men all on her own. Or is she?
Gunpowder Milkshake does a lot of things really well, and it has a terrific cast. Special shout-out to the always amazing Karen Gillan and to Chloe Coleman, who finds a great balance between precocious and absolutely terrified. The very beginning might feel a bit sterile, but once Gillan and Coleman come together, the great, big heart of the movie is revealed. Unfortunately, the entire movie is marred by a messy, uneven script that is unsure of itself. In the first half hour, for example, there is great world-building, with moody locations devoid of people, and just enough details to give the viewer a sense of the shady, dangerous life Sam leads, while at the same time detaching it from any specific reality or time period. There are a lot of flip phones. And then, for some godforsaken reason, someone decided that what this movie needed was a goddamn Uber joke. An Uber joke! As goddamn filler that would have literally been better as silence! Ugh!
I probably shouldn’t make that big a deal out of it, but it irks me to no end. A slightly bigger issue (for me) is the characterization of the villain. Now, I’m all for somebody, anybody really, taking on the concepts of the Patriarchy and capitalism. And the Firm, with its withered old white men only nodding or shaking their head, is a good if somewhat underutilized stand-in. But secondary villain and crime boss McAlester (Ralph Ineson does what he can with the material) gets a weird monologue at the end after an entire movie in the shadows. A monologue that no doubt was meant to humanize him, but it’s dumb and sexist and, above all, the movie doesn’t call this out. Well, let me tell you something: if you have four daughters and you can’t seem to bond with any of them, the problem isn’t them or women, it’s fucking you.
Look, I very much didn’t dislike the movie. Quite the opposite, I liked it, a lot. But it’s a few small nitpicks away from greatness and that makes those nitpicks all the more grating. The action is great, the acting is great, the visuals are great, the world-building is pretty good. All in all, I can wholly recommend this and would love to see more stories in this universe. But what a movie it would be if it wasn’t for that stupid Uber joke…
