** (out of ****)
Starring Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Phillipe, Juliette Lewis, Taye Diggs, Kristen Lehman, Nicky Katt, and James Caan.
Directed & written by Chris McQuarrie.
2000 R
“The Way of the Gun” is written and directed by Chris McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning writer of “The Usual Suspects,” and in both movies he’s hard at work at his overplotting merit badge. “Gun” has complications and complications and complications until we kind of stop caring where the twists and turns take us. It’s a competent action movie, to be certain, with one or two remarkable features, offset by a lack of sincerity. There’s kidnapping, violence, gangsters, lots of profanity, some torture, big guns, way too much macho posturing, and more secrets from the past than Agatha Christie before she’s had her pills. And in this post-“Pulp Fiction” age, there’s also a lot of chatting, some amusing, some not, and there’s some neo-existential mumbo-jumbo chic cynicism thrown in to create the aura of prescience as the camera pulls back over all the dead bodies. I guess that’s what I mean by lack of sincerity.
Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillipe are, like, former mob guys or hitmen or soldiers or something. “Gun” isn’t specific. They have a Butch-Sundance, Riggs-Murtaugh relationship, wherein they know each other well enough to communicate through glances and infuriatingly incomplete sentences. Example:
“Did you—?”
“Yeah.”
“With the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So should we—?”
(Long, faux-thoughtful pause involving music or shifting camera angles.)
“Yeah. Uh-huh.” (spoken real heavily.)
Tired of living off sperm donations, Del Toro and Phillipe decide to kidnap a pregnant woman (Juliette Lewis) to get ransom from the wealthy father of her unborn baby. The father is connected to the mob, or at least a mob, which is why he has the money our protagonists want and the goons they need to kill. So the goons give chase and Our Guys blast them. That’s pretty much it. Watching “The Way of the Gun” I thought there was more to it because writer McQuarrie fills his canvas with all manner of needless complications, such as Lewis being a surrogate mother for another woman’s egg, but then it’s not really the other woman’s egg after all, and the other woman is having an affair with one of the goons going after Our Guys, and the doctor caring for Lewis turns out to not only be the real father of the baby in one scene of revelation, but also the son of the guy who was supposed to be the father in another scene in which the House of Usher falls on someone, and then the father of the girl who’s supposed to be carrying someone else’s baby but is actually carrying her own baby turns out to be—my God, reading this right now I’m surprised there isn’t any incest involved. Maybe there is and I just need to read over it again.
A lot of this you “won’t catch the first time through,” but that can also be said for socks in a load of laundry. Any one of these revelations would be enough for a normal movie. “The Way of the Gun” has all of them, and James Caan. Caan, in the employ of the gangsters, is able to magically locate Our Guys around the time they decide they should let the mother and baby go free. They welch on this decision once she tries to go free on her own, without their permission. Then they decide to re-kidnap her. This is like deciding to set your pet mouse free, only to find it’s already escaped, and then risking life and limb to find it again. That’ll show it. Stupid mouse.
“The Way of the Gun” is surprisingly easy to follow through this labyrinthine mess because none of it really matters. What matters is Our Guys are here, Kidnapped Girl is there, and Bad Guys are on their way. The high point of the entire film is the spectacular gunfight at the end, which owes plenty to the climax of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and there are several other exceptional gunfights along the way. These encounters are good not just for their choreography and McQuarrie’s exceptional ability to keep track of those involved, but because the shooters are cast-iron professionals. They aim, reload, and communicate to one another with frightening precision. This is especially fun to watch in the scenes involving both Our Guys and the two main bodyguards on the Bad Guy side (Taye Diggs is one of them—I forget the other amidst the cumbersome cast), all of whom are mirror images of each other. There are several Mexican stand-offs in the course of the movie, each of them resolved by a bizarre combination of who cares the least about dying or about their friends dying. These four guys are the actual crux of the movie: professional gunmen, trying to outwit each other in pursuit of a single target. These were the parts I enjoyed the most; everything else is just piled on top.
Now I remember. Taye Diggs’ fellow henchman is played by Nicky Katt.
Del Toro, Diggs, and Caan give the film’s best performances. Del Toro is wary and distant, Diggs is detached, calculating, and methodical, then suddenly becomes amused at Caan’s aging hitman, whose endless macho posturing becomes silly. The very-talented Juliette Lewis is good, too, I suppose, but her scenes exist in a vacuum from the rest of the plot, which is already so cluttered, and I felt no emotional attachment to her, or anyone else. That’s the flaw of “The Way of the Gun:” there’s simply too much going on, and while each little universe in itself is good and sort of effective, everything is shoved together too much for any one idea to breathe, or for any feeling to take root.
Finished February 9, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night