Assassin Sam (Karen Gillan) finds herself on a crime consortium’s shit list when she goes off-mission and sets off on a revenge rampage with an eight-year-old named Emily (Chloe Coleman). She’ll need all the help she can get, namely from an all-star squad of female assassins (Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino) and her estranged mother (Lena Headey), who also happens to be an assassin.
Parents, amarite?
Navot Papushado’s brilliantly titled Gunpowder Milkshake chiefly magpies from Kill Bill and John Wick and the resulting mash-up is passably entertaining trashy fun that doesn’t reinvent the genre in any shape way or form. Nothing wrong with that, but it does singularly fail when it comes to convincingly leaning into its signposted gender politics or the central mother-daughter relationship. It does boast two very strong and expertly choreographed shootout sequences, but even these can’t dispel the impression that a kick-ass cast were shamefully underserved by a such derivative script.
Gunpowder Milkshake / D: Navot Papushado (US, 2021) with Karen Gillan, Chloe Coleman, Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino, Lena Headey.
