Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gunpowder Milkshake’ on Netflix, an Overstylized Action-Comedy That Wields Irony Like a Cudgel

Netflix action-comedy Gunpowder Milkshake assembles enough raw talent for two or three movies. Karen Gillan — vaguely recognizable as Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, more so as part of the ensemble in the two recent Jumanji films — headlines as a deadly assassin just like her mother, played by scorching Game of Thrones matriarch Lena Headey. Director Navot Papushado also ropes in Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino as a trio of eyebrow-raising badasses, and Paul Giamatti as a mob guy of some import. As always, the question is whether Papushado can stir all this star power into a delicious cinematic stew.

GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The setting: An unnamed Euro city in the recent past — recent enough that people have cell phones but none of them are smart yet. Sam (Gillan) has just slaughtered the tar out of a slew of hoods, crooks and other misc. scum. She goes home, where she watches cartoons in her jammies and eats cereal while very casually stitching up a big nasty slash on her arm. Her phone rings. She answers. What’s she doing? “Sewing.” Cut to 15 years earlier. A neon-drenched diner stylized within an inch of its formica. Rain, buckets of rain. Young Sam (Freya Allan) sips on a milkshake, waiting for her mother, a contract killer. Three hours pass. Scarlet (Headey) finally arrives to tell her teen-ish daughter that she has to “disappear for a while.” She takes out a few sleazebags who descend upon them before she R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts, never to be seen again except when the plot needs her, because you don’t hire Lena Headey to just show up for six minutes and disappear.

Now it’s the present day. Same diner. Same neon. Same buckets. Same milkshake. Same mommy baggage. We meet Nathan (Giamatti), head of The Firm, a dare I say patriarchal organized crime syndicate named such because one assumes they’re a bunch of gun-toting chest-puffer-outters who are secretly a bunch of limpdicks, and even though I’m probably reading way too much into that, it still seems like a safe assumption to make. He gives Sam an assignment: Track down and put a few bullets in a guy who stole money from The Firm. But first, she needs some new gear. She pulls up to a fancy library in her vintage Porsche, her hat at a rakish tilt, carrying a big yellow bag that reads I HEART KITTENS. She’s like Wick taking a big hot steamy irony bath. The librarians are three, played by Yeoh, Gugino and Bassett. They give her some Bronte, Austin and Woolf, but inside the books aren’t great insights into the feminine mind. No, inside are guns and knives, phallic symbols to be reappropriated against the wielders of the phalluses, he said, interpreting freely.

What with one damn thing and another damn thing, Sam’s gig results in two damn complicated things: She has to rescue an eight-year-old, Emily (Chloe Coleman of My Spy), from kidnappers while fending off killers sent by that blubbery skidmark Nathan. Turns out, one of the scums and bags of dirt Sam dispatched to Heck at the beginning of the movie was the son of a prominent mobster who now wants her head on a plate or in a bag or on a pike or whatever, and Nathan has to comply in order to avoid a mob war. Although Emily is of the type who can absorb blows and shrug off heavy wounds while singlehandedly headshotting numerous attackers, all this may be a bit much for her to handle. Now we ask ourselves, does a movie introduce Headey as a liquidator of life and Bassett, Yeoh and Gugino as gun-dealing neo-stand-ins for the classical Three Crones or Witches or Fates, and then not deposit them in life-or-death gun-and-knife action scenarios against cadres of greasy male hooligans? TO THE A-HOLES GO THE SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: John Wickisms abound. Tarantino-isms too, especially from Kill Bill. The intentionally anonymous and heavily stylized setting has a whiff of Sin City. These are flattering comparisons to make, but in the end, Gunpowder Milkshake has more in common with forgettable genre exercises like Shoot ’Em Up, Smokin’ Aces, and Wanted.

Performance Worth Watching: The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics states that Michelle Yeoh is the best thing about any movie she’s in. This is always true, even when the movie isn’t particularly good and doesn’t give her enough to do.

Memorable Dialogue: This exchange:

“Language. There’s a child present.”

“Fine. Fudge you!”

“Fudge YOU!”

“FUDGE you!”

Sex and Skin: Zilch.

Our Take: Gunpowder Milkshake tries so hard. So so hard. The ironic detachment, the displays of OTT violence, the emo nugget at its core, the women-can-kick-ass-too assertions, the laughing-gas comedy, Papushado’s attempts to inject its every moment with cooler-than-thou tone and style — tryhard stuff, all of it. Even that title tries hard, to lure us into its artificial, overly formalized comic-book world. But what we’ll see is predictable story beats, cheeky references (on the menu at the diner? “Fight Club Sandwich”), flourishes cribbed from the Book of Woo, an Edgar Wright angle here and there, Wick-mythology ripoffs, little flashes of ’80s Carpenterian horror-synths, stabs at warped comedy and other wearying mashup crapola that’s too often indulgent and rarely artful.

Maybe it’s a classic example of style over substance, the who-gives-a-crap characters navigating an environment carved wholly out of affectation, then splattered with copious amounts of blood. Not that any of the drops get on us; we’re kept at a distance, despite its attempt to invoke sympathy for Sam’s wispy-thin arc where maybe she regrets having to kill some people? In the face of being a de-facto mother figure for little Emily? A recurring joke is made out of attempts to preserve Emily’s innocence, where the adult women curtail their profanity, tell her to cover her eyes so she doesn’t see the awful things they’re about to do, or put headphones over her ears and crank the volume, so Papushado can full-blast soundtrack an unctuous action sequence with Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” This thing’s a mess.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Watch Gunpowder Milkshake, and you’ll want to load irony into a cannon and fire it into the nearest supernova.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix