Gunpowder Milkshake (Subtitled) (15)

Sam takes up her mother's murderous mantle for a shadowy syndicate called The Firm under guardian and mentor Nathan. He despatches Scarlet to terminate "an accountant for the clean side of the business" but she inadvertently murders the son of crime lord Jim McAlester then wilfully disobeys orders to use The Firm's cash as ransom money for the dead accountant's eight-year-old daughter, Emily. Nathan has no choice but to issue a kill order against Scarlet.

LondonNet Film Review
Gunpowder Milkshake (15)

Director Navot Papushado’s outlandish caper choreographs one of its most giddily elaborate fight sequences in a cavernous library to the distinctive raspy growl of Janis Joplin. “I’m gonna show you baby, that a woman can be tough,” echoes between wooden book cases as Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino disable a small army of gun-toting goons using claw hammers, metal chains, knife pistols, a tomahawk and gold ingot. As Piece Of My Heart foretells, the film’s resourceful harpies are as cold as ice when it comes to killing anything with a Y chromosome, preferably in slow motion…

Unfortunately, the conflicted characters are less skilled at taking a piece of our hearts with their undernourished back stories and a fractious mother-daughter dynamic that scrimps on a satisfying payoff. Co-written by Papushado and Ehud Lavski, Gunpowder Milkshake is an explosive and fitfully entertaining melee that puts John Wick, Kill Bill and Kingsman: The Secret Service in a blender and garnishes the comic book-violent set-pieces with neon-lit stylistic flourishes. Production design goes into overdrive with a retro diner serving frothy milkshakes and a bowling alley bathed in pink and blue, a visual nod to a bruising battle of the sexes that plays out over almost two hours with the odds stacked heavily in favour of women.

Fifteen years after Scarlet (Headey), an assassin for a shadowy syndicate called The Firm, leaves town in a hurry, her daughter Sam (Gillan) takes up the murderous mantle under guardian and mentor Nathan (Paul Giamatti). He despatches Scarlet to terminate “an accountant for the clean side of the business” but she inadvertently murders the son of crime lord Jim McAlester (Ralph Ineson) then wilfully disobeys orders to use The Firm’s cash as ransom money for the dead accountant’s eight-year-old daughter, Emily (Chloe Coleman).

Nathan has no choice but to issue a kill order against Scarlet. “It’s business and you landed on the wrong side of the balance sheet,” he sombrely informs her. Allies become sworn enemies and Scarlet seeks sanctuary with three librarians – Anna May (Bassett), Florence (Yeoh) and Madeleine (Gugino) – who hide weapons in handsomely handbound copies of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf.

Gunpowder Milkshake vaunts style over substance, anchored by an unsympathetic lead performance from Gillan. Suspensions of disbelief are commonplace. After less than two minutes of driving instruction, Emily steers like a pro during a fast and furious chase through a multi-storey car park and when Scarlet’s arms are temporarily paralysed by nefarious injection, she tapes a blade to one hand, a gun to the other, and uses centrifugal force to inflict damage on three hapless henchmen. Body counts are high (one head is neatly severed on a forklift truck’s metal prong) but emotionally satisfying thrills are in shorter supply.

– Kim Hu