Gunpowder Milkshake Review
Gunpowder Milkshake premieres Wednesday, July 14 on Netflix.
With an abundance of style and a deficit of substance, Gunpowder Milkshake features an impressive lineup of stars — ones who you really want to watch kick a ton of ass — but wastes them with a regrettably empty project that lands with a muddled thud.
A “comic book movie” that’s not based on a comic book, Gunpowder Milkshake presents us with a hyper-stylized bubble world of shadowy money men, female assassins, an endless supply of disposable thugs, and a lone library that’s meant to supply and train members of the “Sisterhood.” Greats Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, and Carla Gugino play the stewards of the library while the MCU’s Karen Gillan plays a lone killer being targeted by – yup – the very organization she works for. Gillan’s Sam is the daughter of Lena Headey’s Scarlet, a hitwoman who was forced to run out on her little girl 15 years earlier. Now Sam must reunite with Scarlet, and join forces with the Sisterhood, in order to take down The Firm. It sounds more fun than it is.
Despite the neon colored-sets and an attempt at a noir-ish, pulpy production design, Gunpowder Milkshake is dragged down by D.O.A. dialogue, rote action sequences, and just an overall lifelessness. As mentioned, it’s assembled an awesome-on-paper, award-winning cast, including Paul Giamatti, and then gives them clinically dry lines to say and tedious roles to portray, as if their mere presence was supposed to be good enough. And, sure, the “hitman running from their own boss” story isn’t new, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done in a fun or fresh way. Gunpowder Milkshake dresses up this time-honored tale with hot pinks and retro diners and a cutesy malt shop aesthetic but that’s all it is: a sugar-coated sheen. The rest is a tonal mess that at its best is quirky “cool” and at its worst is bland and boring.
In an attempt to display its own unique landscape — like a Sin City or a Kill Bill, or even other decent Tarantino/Rodriguez copycats — Gunpowder Milkshake creates an interesting snow globe but then can’t quite manifest the rest. It wants to employ Tarantino’s use of a contrapuntal soundtrack but it doesn’t work. It wants its star, Gillan’s Sam, to be a cosplay-ready heroine with her bowling jacket and a gun tightly taped to her hand (her arms get paralyzed at one point) but it feels forced. And there’s really no attempt made to have any of the characters be funny or interesting.
