The Way of the Gun
Written and Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Starring : Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Phillipe, Juliette Lewis, James Caan,
Nicky Katt and Taye Diggs.
playing at theaters accessible to all - ie - multiplexes
* 1/2 (One and One Half Stars)
I'm betting that a week
or so down the road, someone is going to tell me all the inside workings
and special payoffs that they were able to grasp from 'The Way of the Gun'.
And I'm betting that I'll hear the better story from them than was actually
put on screen. And I'm betting that no matter how much water they add to
the genre films reminiscent of 'The Usual Suspects' (which McQuarrie himself
wrote) and 'Pulp Fiction', they won't seem more than a few tinges of originality
in the face of blatantly overused material.
McQuarrie seems content to disturb
the balance of crime dramas by over-loading the film with plot strands,
characters and double-crosses, but he has failed to make any of it exciting.
He has no trouble creating precise, intelligent characters, but he's more
interested in having them survive (or not survive) gunfights than anything
else. (SPOILER ALERT) In fact, I'd have been
very moved to see a crime drama whose main goal was to show that crime
doesn't pay by pitting some intelligent kidnappers against a rich, forceful
crime syndicate and, in the end, having the realistic side win (namely,
the crime syndicate). McQuarrie almost seems to want to do this, as he
ends his film this way, but he never really lets these characters speak
for themselves. Everyone in the film, though talky and sharp, seem to have
less to do with an actual narrative than with a sick ploy McQuarrie is
purporting to challenge himself: Can I heap all of this complicated structure
together and still have it come out as clear and electrifying as 'The Usual
Suspects'? And the answer is a resounding no, simply because McQuarrie
is not the director Bryan Singer ('The Usual Suspects', 'Apt Pupil', 'X-men')
is. While Singer had no trouble taking enough plot for five films and making
the confusion seem necessary and the conclusion seem lucid; McQuarrie seems
to enjoy the confusion much more than the conclusion, which, honestly,
is a non-balletic shoot-out so loud and dull, you'll wish this slightly-higher-than-cable
movie would just end already.
Some poor casting choices
don't help. Though Del Toro and Phillipe are intact - and even fun to watch
- Lewis is a horrible choice for their kidnapping victim. The movie is
so preoccupied with making the kidnapping seem different than any other
cinema kidnapping, it makes Lewis's character, who is surrogate mother
to the crime syndicate head's child, seem an obsure reference in an otherwise
straightforward gallery of characters. It doesn't help that Caan is played
off as a mumbly old man whose experience alone makes him worthy to win
this little game of McQuarrie's. And finally, if Katt and Diggs were written
any more detached, I was really going to wonder if they were just wandering
over to the set from another film to shoot the breeze while the camera
was rolling (there's even a dim subplot where the crime syndicate head's
wife is seeing Diggs, which, upon first inspection seemed to be just another
branch on this front-loaded tree of plot elements; but upon closer inspection,
it is one of the many nuances in the film actually are familiar).
Finally, to add spite to
this clunker, there are some scenes near the opening of the film that are
nice because they are confidantly told in a visual - rather than verbal
manner. I couldn't help wondering if McQuarrie were going to be as haphazard
to include so many elements that don't gel or work together, why not experiment
by making this film dialogue-less? Another of my brilliant, however useless
suggestions to those in charge of churning out films.
If McQuarrie really wanted
to wow us, he'd have made a film that had zero criminals in it - but read
just as gracefully as 'The Usual Suspects'.
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