CRITIC ESSAY
THE WAY OF THE GUN 2000
45%
Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Starring Ryan Phillippe, Benicio Del Toro, Juliette Lewis, Taye Diggs, Nicky Katt, James Caan
Let’s say it’s the beginning of the twenty-first century. Like a lot of people, you probably spent a good portion of the previous decade watching crime movies. Not just any crime movies, mind you—the kind with hip soundtracks, fast-talking wink-nudge dialogue, shocking violence, and a too-cool-for-film-school vibe. For a while, these jukebox versions of Jim Thompson–style stories (let’s call the subgenre “pulp fiction,” because y’know, give it a name) were everywhere.
So let’s also say that, even though it’s a totally different millennia, you notice there’s a new crime film in theaters. Check out the poster, a lotta semi-recognizable character actors staring out, some old, some new, all of them looking stoic. One of them is holding a gun. No surprise there: gun is in the title. It’s from the guy who wrote The Usual Suspects. You think, I’ve seen this already, haven’t I?
Well, you have and you haven’t. It helps to remind people of what the moment was like when Christopher McQuarrie released The Way of the Gun into theaters in September 2000. We’d seen countless diminishing returns regarding the Clintonera template of crazysexycrime flicks, and audiences were suffering from what critic Scott Tobias called “an acute case of Quentin Tarantino fatigue.” The assumption was that Way would just be more of the same old warmed-over Royale With Cheese.
And when you watch the first five minutes of McQuarrie’s directorial debut, there’s not a lot of reason to think otherwise. Two men walk out of a bar. Some colorful shit-talking ensues, courtesy of Sarah Silverman (!) and one of the guys, who’s played by Ryan Phillippe. She throws around a particularly nasty epithet used to denigrate homosexuals; he offers to “fuck-start her head.” We know punches are going to get thrown… though we don’t expect that Phillippe will forego hitting Silverman’s boyfriend and end up just clocking her. It’s a toxic intro, followed by an even worse sequence in a sperm clinic.
Also, Phillippe and partner Benicio Del Toro’s monikers are Parker and Longbaugh, the real surnames of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This is not going well.
All the more surprising, then, when McQuarrie drops the majority of the cutesy meta touches so characteristic of those second-generation reservoir pups and settles into a groove that harkens even further back. Once the plot proper kicks in—these two are petty criminals, and they’ve stumbled onto easy cash by kidnapping a pregnant woman, only “easy” never really enters into it—it’s clear the writer-director is not interested in being Tarantino; he’s after bigger game. He’s thinking of a different seventies cinema, the kind where you can smell the whiskey and weariness coming out of the characters’ pores. The touchstone is not Pulp Fiction here but Sam Peckinpah.
McQuarrie has denied that The Way of the Gun is his attempt to channel the spirit of Bloody Sam, and you won’t find the late, great filmmaker’s signature Grand Guignol set pieces here. We’ll gingerly suggest that he’s missing the middle of the Venn Diagram where their work meets. This is one of the very few films to nail the mixture of lyricism and fatalism that was Peckinpah’s stock-in-trade. Combine that with the film’s singular blend of bruised masculinity and by-any-means-necessary maternal protectiveness, and you have the real tone of McQuarrie’s misunderstood, magnificent outlaw blues.
The bruised masculinity comes in the form of nearly every male character on screen—primarily in Phillippe’s ragged, ferret-like killer and Del Toro’s high-caliber philosopher (more on the Notorious BDT in a bit), but also in Parker and Longbaugh’s counterparts, two slick-as-goose-shit bodyguards played by Taye Diggs and Dazed and Confused’s Nicky Katt. They’ve been hired to protect a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis, supplying killer maternal instincts), who’s having the baby of Scott Wilson’s corrupt rich bastard, and to keep an eye on his son, the woman’s OB-GYN (Dylan Kussman).
Their interactions go in ways you don’t expect. Lewis’s Robin is involved in a memorable shoot-out, one of several, but we barely get to see the gunfire. We do, however, see the bodies lying on the ground after, only one of which we recognize as a bad guy; the movie purposefully holds on the shot four times as long as you expect, all the better to linger not on the violence but on what violence leaves in its wake. A car chase that purposefully never seems to get to third gear follows.
Often, there’s silence, like the scene in which Del Toro has to decide whether he’s going to save his own ass or risk it to save Robin’s, as she goes into labor and everyone else goes ballistic. Concentrate on the performance, the way Del Toro turns his head and puts one hand over his eye as he views a sonogram; watching again, you realize it’s perfect. No big speeches, no heroic gestures. Exactly what a grandstanding star would not do.
The gist is: McQuarrie knows what you want. He’s not going to give it to you, however, not really. He’s admitted that he made this movie in a state of frustration with the movie business, which only wanted him to do crime movies, preferably something like Usual Suspects Redux. The writer-director decided, after some prodding from Del Toro, to put his rage on the page. The resulting movie is indeed filled with cinephiliac pleasures: Joe Kraemer’s castanets-heavy score; its look, courtesy of cinematographer Dick Pope, going full-tilt retro seventies.
But it’s really a movie about withholding, slowing it down, making you think about what you’re watching, why you root for who you root for. Yes, it’s self-conscious, but it’s also self-aware. It wasn’t going to be just another video-store-cool movie—no wonder audiences didn’t show up. It was occasionally going to get ponderous and plod even when it hit maximum pulpitude—no wonder many (though not all) critics blew a Bronx raspberry at it. And The Way of the Gun would prove that, even with a girl and a gun and photogenic guys playing tough, it could take the raw material of a million other films and make it feel like its own rough beast, slouching toward Tijuana and no man’s land. No wonder we fans keep going back to it again and again.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus Christopher McQuarrie may exhibit a way behind the camera in the stylish The Way of the Gun, but his script falters with dull characterization and a plot so needlessly twisty that most viewers will be ready to tune out before the final reveal.