BA_Harrison
The success of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction spawned a whole wave of gritty copycat thrillers that revolved around unsavoury characters doing bad things to each other. The Way of The Gun is one such film, featuring two reprehensible criminal drifters— Mr. Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Mr. Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro)—who kidnap and hold to ransom Robin (Juliette Lewis), the heavily pregnant surrogate mother of a Mafia money launderer, who shows his displeasure by sending out his toughest men to bring her back.Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who also wrote the over-rated The Usual Suspects, the film struggles to match the hip sense of style or sharpness of dialogue of either of Tarantino's aforementioned films, despite the best efforts of a cool cast that includes Taye Diggs, James Caan, and Juliette's old man, Geoffrey Lewis. McQuarrie does at least manage to end his film with a suitably ballistic scene that lives up to the title: a well executed and very bloody Peckinpah style gun battle that leaves a pile of corpses in its wake.
Low_Rent
I can see why Ryan Phillippe's career has stalled, his acting is horrible in this movie. I feel bad for Benicio Del Toro because is a a really good actor in a really bad movie.The dialogue is terrible. It seems the writer is trying to emulate the verbal minutiae of movies like Pulp Fiction but it comes off as just babbling. There is no cleverness to the exchange between characters.The actions of the characters are odd in the sense that many of the things they do don't seem to further the plot or character development. Violence for violence sake so to speak.Just avoid this turd of a movie.
Cyril Julien
Some films simply slip under the radar when it comes to accolades and praise, they remain almost cult or legendary in their status to a few. In a lot of cases these films are not "that" good, just simply have a special appeal to generate a cult following. But in the case of a special few like 'Millers Crossing' or 'Glengarry Glen Ross', these movies are truly amongst the leaders and very best in their field, to the point that as soon as the credits roll, you wonder how the hell you've never watched this before or why it didn't make greater box office or claim any major awards.The Way of the Gun is like the bastard child of a Western and a Gangster flick, holding many of the attributes of both genres and belonging to neither in whole. It centres around two wayfaring career-criminals who stumble into a kidnapping that leads to a great deal more than they bargained for. Every character in this film has game, everyone brings something motivated to the table with a twisted angle or a revelation. This movie oozes cool in almost every scene with Benicio Del Toro leading that emphasis with inspired panache! Ryan Phillippe has never performed this well again and both James Caan and Taye Diggs excel in their roles. If writer-director Christopher McQuarrie ever blesses us with another specimen presented as brilliantly as this then we should consider ourselves truly fortunate.If ever a movie was worthy of 10 stars, it's this one. Everything from the well paced, unfolding plot and the riveting chess-like gun-play to the awesome musical score that hits the nail on the head like Elmer Burnstein's Magnificent Seven or John Williams's Superman theme. A hidden gem that's well worth discovering for the first time as much as it is revisiting, superb!
alienworlds
Choppy start and an even choppier middle and a very choppy ending make this a film that almost put me to sleep at the half way mark. Lots of standard pseudo cool verbal exchanges that are almost memorable and an almost action filled ending that is really just like a standard western gunfighting scene by another name is kind of a bore to me. Luckily I had eaten some mystery pizza that caused me to have to take off to the bathroom so I avoided some of it. Not really terrible but it seemed to stay stuck at about 70 mph, not really fast, not really slow, and not really exciting either. James Caan saves the day and kicks the bad guys asses, bad guys that the film has identified with the entire time as really the good guys in a land of jungle thick corruption. Could have been much better.
AD
