| Matt Clark |
The Way of the Gun plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, November 28th, through Sunday, November 30th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
For the last 15 years, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has essentially been in the Tom Cruise business. Eight of the ten pictures that list McQuarrie as a writer and the entirety of his directorial output (most of which now consists of Mission: Impossible films) since 2010 have starred Cruise. With McQuarrie completely focused on tentpole blockbuster action vehicles for one of the planet’s most popular actors—it could be easy to forget that he burst onto the scene with his Academy Award-winning script for The Usual Suspects—the tightly plotted ensemble sensation that exemplified the 90s indie crime boom. What even fewer people recall is that McQuarrie’s follow-up film and directorial debut was 2000s Way of the Gun; a neo-Western crime thriller brimming with excessive violence and palpable rage. A far cry from a Cruise picture, Gun is a film in the true exploitation tradition filled with unlikeable characters performing despicable deeds.
Way of the Gun opens outside of a crowded bar where protagonists Parker and Longbaugh (Ryan Philippe and Benicio Del Toro) get into an altercation with a man and his girlfriend over setting off their car alarm. This leads to an expletive-laden tirade from the girlfriend (Sarah Silverman credited as “Raving Bitch”), and a huge brawl ignited by Parker punching her in the face. Very little backstory is given for Parker and Longbaugh, but this sequence sets the stage for their amorality as well as the generally provocative tone of the film. They are drifters, they are capably violent, and according to Parker they are “looking for the fortune we knew was looking for us.” This fortune comes in the form of a young surrogate mother, Juliette Lewis’s Robin, who the pair kidnap to ransom her from her wealthy benefactor. What they do not realize is that the benefactor is, in fact, a mobbed-up money launderer who sends his bag man, Joe Sarno played by James Caan, to collect Robin and dispense with Parker and Longbaugh. Various interested parties and associates are introduced, and their motivations and interconnectivity are uncovered until everything erupts in an epically violent finale reminiscent of a Peckinpah film.
McQuarrie’s visceral, unsentimental approach to cinematic violence is arguably the selling point of the film—it’s titled Way of the Gun, after all. For all the bloody fallout stemming from each ferocious set piece, they aren’t cartoonish in their execution. The characters employ believable, military-style tactics and regularly must find cover or reload their weapons. The violence isn’t without consequences, but there’s a genuine callousness to it as well. The initial shootout reveals a parking lot littered with bodies caught in the crossfire. One of which is unceremoniously pulled from behind a steering wheel and dumped on the ground. Robin and her unborn child are repeatedly threatened with bodily harm with guns frequently leveled at her belly. More than one character also intimates that Robin’s life is only worth preserving so long as she is carrying her child. Nearly everyone in the film seems inured to brutality while empathy remains the more alien concept.
Individuals this repugnant can make for a challenging viewing even if the on-screen action is compelling and McQuarrie manages an interesting balancing act here. Though his characters are repellent; he casts them with fantastically watchable actors. Benecio Del Toro is channeling something akin to James Dean in his unconventional physicality. A scene in which he wordlessly semi-seduces a young gas station attendant feels layered and mysterious. James Caan’s Joe Sarno is arguably the most humane character outside of Robin, but it’s really Caan’s ability to shift from charm to gravitas and to menace that keep the audience’s eyes on Sarno. Naturally, the scene of Longbaugh and Sarno discussing their predicament over coffee in a roadside diner is one of the finest character moments in the film. Also worth mentioning is Sarno’s suicidal associate, Abner, played by Juliette’s father: Geoffrey Lewis. Abner brings a certain brand of dark humor and ultimately some sense of stakes in the midst of the mayhem.
Very little in Way of the Gun is indicative of the kinds of films McQuarrie would go on to make. It’s too mean-spirited, too vulgar, and genuinely feels like a film intended to offend. The only piece that does seem to fit in with his later work is the massive action set piece finale. A huge shootout in a Mexican brothel with the fate of both Robin and her baby very much in question. Hundreds of rounds are spent as Sarno and a horde of anonymous bag men descend on Parker and Longbaugh hoping to leave with both the baby and the ransom money intact. It’s a terrific sequence and very worthy of the kind of epic, violent Westerns McQuarrie is nodding to while perhaps containing some inkling of where his career was heading.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon