DVD Review: The Way of the Gun

I am not sure why so many contemporary directors think that they can salvage bad film noir with cheap, agonizingly long gunfights. A case in point is Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun, a silly tale of two small-time crooks (played by Ryan Phillippe and Benicio del Toro), who kidnap a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) who is just days (hours?) away from giving birth. The father-to-be is a wealthy (and criminal) developer, who sends his bodyguards and a bagman (James Caan) to chase after the kidnappers, the mother, and the unborn baby. Of course, the kidnappers demand a ransom, most of the cast ends up in northern Mexico (because McQuarrie apparently cannot resist the cheap and tired use of the Mexican desert as a backdrop for outlaw violence), and we encounter a few "plot twists" along the way. (Guess what?! The child doesn't belong to the developer after all!)

Despite having won an Academy Award^® for his work on The Usual Suspects, McQuarrie has produced a disappointing—nay, an asinine—script. Besides his unimaginative use of cliched storylines (cliches are fine so long as they are creatively—or at least stylishly—presented), McQuarrie ends up relying on blood-and-guts: namely, a drawn out scene of a cesarean section and an endless gun battle at (where else?) a Mexican brothel. If we are to believe the special features, McQuarrie apparently thought that he was expanding or reinterpreting the film noir Western and that he was helping us to broaden our aesthetic perspective beyond the narrow good guy / bad guy motif. (Criminals have feelings, too! We can sympathize with the bad guy!). If McQuarrie thought that he was treading new ground, then he apparently never watched Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief or Tarrantino's Jackie Brown.

The Way of the Gun both insulted my intelligence and offended my sensibilities. Despite a few catchy bits of dialogue—which get derailed by McQuarrie's excessive (and juvenile) use of the f-bomb—this movie is not worth your time, let alone your money. Final Score: 3.75 out of 10.