Gunpowder Milkshake is a stylish action flick worth your time

Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t out to change your world, but it is a bright, colorful action flick that features good actors serving stylized versions of themselves.

Gunpowder Milkshake is a Netflix exclusive action flick starring Lena Headey and Karen Gillan as a mother-daughter assassin family. Headey’s character, Scarlet, had to abandon daughter Sam when she was young, after a hit gone wrong. Fifteen years later, Sam has taken up the family business, killing for a shadowy organization called the Firm.

But when she too gets into a sticky situation on the job, she finds herself fighting her powerful employer, aided by her resurfaced mom, a group of gun-running assassins who manage a library as a front, and a little girl named Emily (Chloe Coleman), the daughter of one of Sam’s marks.

So that’s what Gunpowder Milkshake is about. But the movie is really about what it’s about; it’s about how it’s about it. In other words, you don’t watch a movie like this for the plot, although what’s there is solid; you watch it for a style, and that is where this movie shines.

Naturally, there are a lot of action scenes in Gunpowder Milkshake; there are gunfights, there are swordfights, there’s a beat-down in a bowling alley and an automotive rumble in a parking garage. I’ve seen fight scenes that move faster and feel more elegant, but these are as creative as anything in the genre, and they don’t skimp on the brutality. One particularly memorable scene takes place in a hospital; Sam’s arms have been paralyzed by a Firm doctor, so she has Emily tape a knife to her one hand and a gun to the other. She rolls out into the hallway in a bulletproof swivel chair and the chaos begins.

The movie gets a fair bit of mileage from contrasting Emily’s youth and innocence with all the stylized bloodshed happening around her, especially in that parking garage scene. Director Navot Papushado doesn’t just know how to shoot action; he knows when to drill down on the characters so there’s some push and pull, some stakes, even though we always get back to the splatter sooner or later.

The actors also help a lot. The cast is uniformly stacked. Between Doctor Who and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Karen Gillan has a wealth of experience doing this kind of spectacle movie; in fact, Gunpowder Milkshake is toned down compared to those. She’s more than capable of anchoring us in this far-out world that’s like our own but not quite. Why does the Firm conduct business in a 50s-style diner? What video rental place is left standing for criminals to hold a hostage in it? Who ever saw a library that elaborate, whether or not its a front for a gun-running business? Gunpowder Milkshake exists just outside of reality, which makes it easier to accept when the high-flying stunts start happening.

Lena Headey is solid as expected as Scarlet, but the real scene-stealers are the librarians: Anna May, Madeline and Florence; played by Angela Bassett, Carla Gugino and Michelle Yeoh, all of them screen icons in their own right. I get of get the idea that Papushado made this film just to highlight the talents of these women, because they’re all used perfectly. Yeoh, who gained notoriety after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and who’s been kicking ass ever since, has the most impressive fight choreography. Bassett brings the grit as Anna May, and Gugino actually manages to pull down some pathos as Madeline.

But not that much pathos. Again, this movie is not about the plot, or the characters. The dialog is chunky and the emotional beats are superficial. It’s more about the saturated pop art colors that punch through the screen; it’s about the off-center, unstuck-in-time world imagined up by the production team; it’s about the soundtrack that is clearly just the director’s favorite tunes set to action; and it’s about seeing iconic actors try on familiar archetypes like they’re comfortable old shoes.

Also Paul Giamatti plays a weary crime lord who sighs a lot. That’s enough for a watch while you fold laundry or do dishes, right?

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