Gunpowder Milkshake Review

Gunpowder Milkshake is a part of the tread of mid-budget action movies. It was a film that has been released by Netflix in the US and Sky Cinema in the UK.

Sam (Karen Gillan) is an assassin for The Firm. She’s given a job to get back some money stolen from The Firm. She ends up getting involved in a rescue mission to save Emily (Chloe Coleman) and crossing The Firm and a rival crime family in the process.

Gunpowder Milkshake was a film I had been interested in for a long time. I am a fan of Karen Gillan which automatically drew my interest and I had been following Gillan and director Navot Papushado’s Instagram pages. It was a stylised action film which I generally like and I am a sucker for films that focus on badass ladies (i.e Hanna, Kick-Ass, and Atomic Blonde). The other draws of Gunpowder Milkshake were the supporting cast which featured Lena Headley, Angela Bassett, Carla Gugino, and Michelle Yeoh, and Papushado who has developed a strong reputation in his native Israel.

From a purely action level, Gunpowder Milkshake was good. There were some really cool fights and shootouts. Gillan got to show off her physicality in the bowling alley as she had to fight off three goons from The Firm. Her only item was a children’s suitcase which she used to great effect. The other major action sequence was the raid of The Library. It was a prolonged sequence that had gunfire and hand-to-hand combat. It was awesome as weapons like hammers, chains, batons, and various firearms get used.

The fight in the doctor’s office had a lot of physical comedy. Sam’s arms were paralysed, and she had to have her weapons taped to her hands whilst the goons were high on laughing gas. It was an entertaining sequence that showed Gillan’s abilities as a physical comedian as she did in the Jumanji movies.

Besides Gillan, the highlights from the cast were Headey, Coleman, and Gugino. Gillan’s Sam had to spend most of her time with Coleman’s Emily and Coleman shows she has a lot of ability at her young age. Gillan and Coleman worked well together, especially when Gillan’s Sam needed Emily’s assistance during some of the action sequences.

Throughout the film parenthood was a major theme. This was shown throughout many of the character dynamics. Early in the film Sam’s mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey) abandoned her when she was 12. Sam was resentful towards her mother, and she didn’t want Emily to suffer a similar fate. Sam acts as a surrogate mother to Emily. Scarlet’s act was one of redemption: she wanted forgiveness from Sam and they have to team up during the raid on the Library. Paul Giamatti’s Nathan, who is Sam’s handler and was raised from the age of 12 did try everything he could to prevent Sam coming to harm. Even the motivation of the film’s villain was simple: revenge for his son’s death. This parenting theme even extends to Gugino’s Madeline since she acted motherly and protective towards Sam and Emily and had a Mumsie look to her.

Papushado and his team did want to give Milkshake Gunpowder a stylised look. It was a neon-lit film where the colours popped, and the time and place were hard to identify. This was set in a world where Sam dressed in a black coat and hat which made her look like a femme fatale from film noir, the cars, and the diner looked like they came from the ‘50s, and most of the characters used flip-phones. Yet there were references to modern pop culture, like The Walking Dead.

Gunpowder Milkshake has been met with some mixed reviews. It has a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, 48% on Metacritic, 6.0 on IMDB. Some reviews on YouTube have called Gunpowder Milkshake feminism, anti-men propaganda and a woke action film. This says more about these critics’ viewpoints and their own insecurities than the film itself. The real issue with Gunpowder Milkshake was it lacked depth. The story for Gunpowder Milkshake was generic because it compared two standard plots: assassin crosses the wrong people and assassin has to protect a child.

Gunpowder Milkshake was a mishmash of other popular action films. The most obvious comparison was with the John Wick series because of the lightness of tone, the plot of criminals hunting down a badass assassin, and The Library was just the Continental Hotel. There was also quite a bit of Leon in Gunpowder Milkshake due to the relationship between Sam and Emily. A moment where Emily had to listen to a cassette player during the action felt similar to a scene in the John Woo classic Face/Off.

Compared to some other recent action films, like Snake Eyes, Gunpowder Milkshake had a personality that will help it stand up amongst the crowd. It’s a solid film for action junkies.