Gunpowder Milkshake

Gunpowder Milkshake, like its namesake, is a concoction made of two parts: the milk, which is the storytelling, dialogue, and world building, and the ice cream, which is the action. The problem with the movie is that no matter how delicious the ice cream is, the fact that the milk is rancid ruins the dish.

Truth be told, the ice cream isn’t that great to begin with. The quality of the action scenes is fairly all over the place, ranging from abysmal to inventive but flawed, although it trends towards improving over time. The first major action beat, a fight scene between our femme fatale assassin and a trio of capable but outmatched thugs, is painfully bad; reading more like bad stage fighting choreography than an actual bone-breaking melee. On the other hand, the combination shootout and kung fu clash, evoking John Woo movies to an extent, in the beginning of the climax is much better conceived and constructed, giving adequate time for multiple threaded mini-conflicts to artfully develop throughout, balancing the drama of each while moving around frequently enough that you never lose track of the location and stakes of the others.

Stylistically, the action, like much of the rest of the movie, is one of the many post-John Wick projects that feels like it is trying to capture that same feel but maybe not as well. The assassin(s) gone rogue, the protection of the innocents, the neon drenched… everything. Gunpowder Milkshake takes that whole idea and turns it up to the maximum, and not to the film’s benefit. The movie is somehow more violent and spends more time reveling in that violence, to the point that it begins to feel gratuitous and fetishized. It takes an almost Kill Bill approach to its use of blood and viscera, exaggerating it to a level that feels cartoonish and detached from reality, as if to nod to the audience that this is not to be taken any more seriously than an episode of Tom & Jerry. Knife stabs don’t just penetrate the chest of their victims, they draw red paint-like splashes of blood as they are withdrawn. A giant sculpture falls on a man’s head and rather than frame the moment to imply the death, the film shows the mist of blood that spurts out from where his head used to be. This kind of violence isn’t for everyone and to me, someone who has probably a higher than average tolerance for such things, it all felt very excessive.

The biggest trouble for the movie, however, is the storytelling, dialogue, and worldbuilding; the milk of the opening metaphor. It is absolutely garbage. The story is thin without being minimalist, the worst of all worlds. Rather than pare the story back completely to something bare bones, with the intention of letting the action shine, it gets muddied in complicated back stories, relationships, and shadow organizations. Each of these muddying complications, however, is thinner than paper, so the net result isn’t something rich and interesting but something that still feels empty and cliche even while being unnecessarily complex.

Much of the blame for this is a result of worldbuilding. The alternative reality setting of the story is a befuddling contradiction: both fascinating and bland. It, again, borrows from John Wick’s toolbox with a world that strangely emulates urban fantasy, just with criminals in place of wizards: secret places only they know with special rules that must be followed on the premises, curious characters of morally gray temperament that can be called upon for special tasks, shopkeepers with special wares for only the trusted buyer, etc.. However, Gunpowder Milkshake handles this poorly. The exposition to establish these ideas, places, and key figures is often clunky. The need to establish and explain much of the world, which it does like much bad fantasy by telling rather than showing, adds the aforementioned paper thin complications that muddy the storytelling. Rather than add to the film, and draw the audience into its foreign but familiar world, it detracts by being too much to be ignored but too little to be enjoyable. And none of this is helped by the characters themselves.

The dialogue in Gunpowder Milkshake is terrible. It is hard to completely encapsulate in words how cringe-inducingly bad many of the exchanges in this movie are. The word choices are stilted and awkward, the delivery is often monotone as a way to fake coolness, and the attempts at humor never land. The characters often act or say things that are illogical or defy the very rules of the world the audience is supposed to be buying into. In one exchange with some “librarians” and our protagonist, the dialogue takes a metaphor about a ghost, employing a double meaning of someone who has gone missing and the soul of the departed still lingering on earth, and tortures it to a level I had not thought possible by a professional screenwriter. In another, several characters arrive with guns in a location where guns are “not allowed,” a sort of deus ex machina, and the dialogue offers only 1980s-style one liners rather than an explanation of how this came to pass.

The Onion once made a satirical piece about how the Fast and the Furious movies were the product of a young boy playing with his matchbox cars and inventing a movie out of the wild fantasies of his play. This movie brings that same energy, only with the matchbox cars replaced with a cursory understanding of John Wick and a love of the badass killing machine archetype. The world is half-formed and designed more with the rule of cool in mind than any sense of genuine place or internal logic. The dialogue is often stiff and coldly impersonal for no reason. The action scenes are the one bright spot, always ambitious in their conception but uneven in their execution. I initially walked away from the movie thinking it was passable fair entertainment, if a tad disappointing. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized what an unmitigated mess it actually is. Unlike The Protege, a film I reviewed last year with similar inspirations, its attempt to be like John Wick (with a twist) makes something that doesn’t just fail by comparison but also fails in a vacuum.

Would Recommend: If you are starving for neon-drenched gun fights.

Would Not Recommend: If you want something more than a poor John Wick imitator.