Rated: MA 15+
Directed by: Navot Papushado
Screenplay by: Navot Papushado, Ehud Lavski
Producers: Andrew Rona, p.g.a. Alex Heineman, p.g.a
Starring: Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Chloe Coleman, Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, Angela
Bassett.
Gunpowder Milkshake opens to the sounds of a thunderstorm as lone assassin Sam (Karen Gillan) is
completing a hit in her target’s apartment. A rhythmic thudding draws her attention so she turns toward the door. Behind it is a small militia with all guns drawn and pointed at her.
Later, when she is tucked up at home watching TV and casually stitching a flesh wound on her own arm, Sam receives a call summoning her to meet with Nathan (Paul Giamatti), her handler and front man for a shadowy cabal called The Firm.
She’s in trouble.
‘It was supposed to be a low profile gig, not a massacre.’
She has killed the wrong man and The Firm wants to cut her loose, leaving her unprotected.
One of the attackers Sam dispatched was the son of an influential crime figure that The Firm wants onside. When his henchmen find her, Jim McAlester (Ralph Ineson) has vowed, ‘to do terrible things’ to her.
There is only one place left for Sam to turn. The Library. A front and an armoury for a nest of female assassins.
Filmed in Berlin, director Navot Papushado’s city has that otherworldly, Dark City-esque sense of a city forever in darkness lit with glowing neon, a city we recognise but can’t quite identify.
In this parallel reality the violence is so extreme, so gratuitous and so utterly over-the-top that it has a cartoon quality, but it’s the crazily inventive and completely goofy situations that arise from the action that set this movie apart.
If Sam is to leave the Dental Surgery she uses as a makeshift hospital, she must fight her way out of an ambush with both of her arms paralysed.
For their side, the faceless men in black suits, The Firm’s board members and McAlester’s mafia-style crime family both represent rigidly hierarchical organisations. ‘They make all the rules and change them when it suits their needs’, always assured of their ability to muster overwhelming force.
When McAlester’s man Virgil (Adam Nagaitis) yells out, ‘You think you have a chance here? I’ve got an army!’ He means it. His boss has sent a bus full of men to take Sam down.
Sheltering from the gunfire behind the library’s check in desk with her mother (Lena Headey), Sam counters, ‘I’ve got my mum’.
Sam’s retort is pitch perfect and it beautifully encapsulates so much of the nuance in the movie. Not only does it acknowledge the fact of Sam’s dearly longed for relationship with her estranged mother in this desperate moment and the ferocity of her mother, she is a formidable ally, but also the way that the movie unobtrusively values the traditionally feminine arts such as sewing alongside gun slinging and close-quarters combat.
Never underestimate a librarian, or the emancipating qualities of good book. The women are kickass in this movie, taking it up to the men on their own terms, even while they have quietly created pockets of resistance that function beneath their notice and an ingenious method to hide their weapons.
This movie is just plain fun to watch.