BORN TO BE WILD
‘Gunpowder Milkshake’ throws Karen Gillan in the deep end with its relentless pastiche, says Clarisse Loughrey, while ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is a strong idea in search of an execution, and Nicolas Cage goes full Cage in Japan
Gunpowder Milkshake
★★★☆☆
Dir: Navot Papushado. Starring: Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Carla Guǀno, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett. 15, 114 mins.
Karen Gillan’s Sam, the pistol-wielding assassin at the centre of Gunpowder Milkshake, is a jumble of affectations in search of a personality. At home, she subsists on chemical-dyed cereal and episodes of Bee and PuppyCat, a deliriously cute animated series about a disgruntled millennial and her intergalactic pet. Her small arsenal of weapons is ferried around town in a bright yellow duffel bag. She has an impulsive fondness for silk bomber jackets.
Not that you’d hear any of this from her own lips – she’s as silent and sullen as the rest of her professional colleagues. And her backstory hardly feels revelatory either. Sam is yet another abandoned child of an assassin parent (in this case, Lena Headey’s Scarlet) who’s decided to follow the family business. But here’s the kicker: when a job goes wrong and she’s forced to care for the daughter (Chloe Coleman) of one of her targets, she turns to the only people she can trust – Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, and Carla Gugino, playing a trio of assassins inexplicably dressed like the Powerpuff Girls.
It’s clear that director Navot Papushado considers his femaledominated cast revolutionary enough in itself to justify the relentless pastiche of Gunpowder Milkshake. And to some degree, he’s right. His film is fun, in exactly the way you’d imagine a mash-up of John Wick and Quentin Tarantino in which Bassett wields dual hammers in reference to The Raid 2 might be. There’s a retro diner that seemingly only serves murderous clientele and some Morricone-esque whistling on Frank Ilfman’s score – Papushado’s references are broad, certainly, but occasionally amusing.
His script, co-written with Ehud Lavski, makes sure to subvert the most tiresome tropes of the female action hero. It’s still surprising, even in 2021, to see a film that blends the hyperfeminine and hyperviolent in a way that doesn’t simply resort to overt sexualisation. Neither is Sam ever forced into the
position of de facto mother figure – the film is always at its most emotionally sincere when Gillan and Headey are granted a little room to work out their mutually ambivalent feelings toward parenthood.
But there’s a stark difference between what’s expected of a franchise star – Gillan, who never overplays the moment, has been a welcome presence in the Marvel and Jumanji movies – and the demands of purely action-driven vehicles. It feels like she’s been thrown in the deep end with Gunpowder Milkshake, expected to perform at the same standard as Keanu Reeves with just a fraction of the training. There’s a fight scene in a bowling alley, captured in an uncompromising wide shot. An observer, the blood draining from their face, mutters: “Who is she?” But when Papushado cuts back to Sam, all she’s doing is flailing her limbs at people like a scarecrow in a boxing match.
The film clearly sees the potential in its cast of talented women, but struggles to do right by them. It spends so much of its runtime waiting, with bated breath, for Yeoh, Bassett and Gugino to finally roll their sleeves up and get fighting. And, when they do, it’s but a brief spectacle. You’d be forgiven for walking away from Gunpowder Milkshake feeling like you’ve been falsely advertised to.
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie ★★★☆☆
Dir: Jonathan Butterell. Starring: Max Harwood, Sarah Lancashire, Lauren Patel, Ralph Ineson, Sharon Horgan, Richard E. Grant. 15, 115 mins.
“This really happened,” reads a title card at the beginning of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie . “Then we added dancing and singing.” In 2011, the BBC released Jamie: Drag Queen at 16 – a documentary that followed a County Durham teenager, Jamie Campbell, who decided to attend his secondary school prom in drag. The backlash was fierce, and monstrously cruel: students bullied him and teachers outright banned him from the event. His resilience in the face of it all, though, was enough to inspire The Feeling frontman Dan Gillespie Sells and writer Tom MacRae to create a musical based on his story, one that began in 2017 and is still running in the West End today. Its film adaptation has now arrived on Prime Video.
But much has changed in the past decade. Though Jamie’s fight for acceptance both at home and at school is one still shared by countless LGBTQ+ youths, there have been significant advances when it comes to visibility across the cultural and political
spectrum. That’s especially true of drag itself – RuPaul’s Drag Race has reached a point of success where past winner Bianca Del Rio (who briefly starred in Jamie’s West End production) can cameo in this film with an expectation that a good portion of the audience will recognise her. Would an updated retelling for the 2020s ring quite as true? It’s much to director Jonathan Butterell’s credit, then, that his film works so coherently – this isn’t just an adaptation, but a revitalisation. And one that, crucially, is able to replicate the musical’s effervescent joy while still doing the work to place it in a more relevant context.
What MacRae’s screenplay does well is to explore how a gay 16year-old, who’s still very much in the process of discovering themselves, might see their place in the wider LGBTQ+ community of today. Jamie (Max Harwood), here renamed Jamie New, can see a viable career path for himself thanks not only to RuPaul, but to the vibrant makeup community on Instagram. When he first seeks out the help of drag shop owner and former performer Hugo Battersby (Richard E Grant), the jazzy welcome number that usually comes next is replaced with something altogether more sombre.
Grant, who beautifully balances both the tenderness and vivaciousness of the role, launches into “This Was Me” – a trip back through the past few decades of gay liberation, and a tribute to the lingering pain of those who saw loved ones die in the Aids crisis. It’s a brief, but touching moment that helps Jamie gain some perspective on his own struggle. It also reminds the audience watching that, as commercialised as drag might have become, it remains firmly rooted in ideas of political and personal rebellion.
But Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is, at times, a strong idea in search of an equally strong execution. Sarah Lancashire, as Jamie’s mother, is heartbreakingly convincing as a woman who’d do anything to protect her son’s happiness. Though newcomers Harwood and Lauren Patel, as Jamie’s best friend, have an untrained rawness that feels authentic, they struggle to fully deliver the emotional impact of key scenes.
Most noticeably, you can feel Butterell straining himself to enliven the limited, ordinary settings of his musical numbers. When it comes to the cinematic form, there are no barriers to those with enough daring and imagination (this year’s In the Heights is the ideal example of how to do things right) – and yet most of the musical numbers here are centred around some variation on a catwalk. Things get particularly awkward when Sharon Hogan’s homophobic teacher has to perform the electrotinged “Work of Art” while doing nothing else but walking down a school corridor. Why would Everybody’s Talking About Jamie dream so small when its subject did the exact opposite?
Prisoners of the Ghostland
★★★★☆
Dir: Sion Sono. Starring: Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Bill Moseley. 103 mins.
The poster for Prisoners of the Ghostland bears a few ominous words from its star, Nicolas Cage: this is “the wildest movie I’ve ever made”. That’s quite the statement. I’m not sure how I’d even begin to judge it. But there is something fateful, and almost beautiful, about this collaboration between Hollywood’s own master of the unhinged and a director like Sion Sono. A typical film by the Japanese auteur will play like a no-holds barred descent into exquisite madness – whether it’s Love Exposure, his
four-hour opus about the intersection between religion and the art of the panty shot, or his neon-drenched dystopian hip-hop musical Tokyo Tribe.
Prisoners of the Ghostland, a dystopian fantasy about an impossible rescue mission, is actually more sedate than many of Sono’s past efforts. Don’t worry, though – it’s still absolutely deranged, delivering an unholy, perverse mash-up between Mad Max and the twinned genres of the western and the samurai film. Somewhere, in the middle of it all, there’s a thesis on Japan’s uneasy cultural relationship with the US, driven by capitalist interests and the lingering trauma of nuclear destruction. There’s no easing into Sono’s films – this one opens with the sound of Cage’s guttural roar, as he and his criminal partner, Psycho (Nick Cassavetes), hold up a minimalist-style bank where everyone’s inexplicably dressed like an extra from a Jacques Demy musical. And, just when it seems like the life of a small, innocent child may be in danger, Sono interrupts the chaos and catches up with Cage’s character, named only Hero, several years later.
We’re in a place called Samurai Town, where traditional Japanese architecture is embellished with a little High Noon flair. Hero is dragged out of his jail cell and brought before the Governor (Bill Moseley), who offers him a deal: he’ll get his freedom if, in return, he can bring back his supposed granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella), who’s trapped in a living purgatory known only as the Ghostland. That involves changing out of his tiny loincloth and into a leather suit strapped with bombs – if he harms her, his arms blow up. If he feels any desire toward her, his testicles blow up. As he strips in front of the gathered crowd, a few of the women gasp and giggle appreciatively. Another of them simply rolls her eyes and mutters: “I’ve seen better.”
This is Sono’s style to a tee – both operatic and self-consciously obscene. He’s the rare filmmaker that will actually follow through with the threat of testicle explosion. And Cage, of course, seems right at home. In brief, he’s essentially delivering the same performance as he did in the 2006 remake of The
Wicker Man. There’s even an eerily similar sequence in which he tries to fend off the ragged, dystopian-styled Ghostland locals with some karate moves and a “hi–fucking-yah!”, before thrusting a photograph of Bernice into their faces and demanding: “have any of you wwwwhack jobs seen her?” But that erratic of a performance feels almost natural here, and his presence is nicely balanced out by Boutella’s own strait-laced, action hero bravado. Watching the way she moves and fights makes it frustrating that she’s not often spoken about in the same breath as her Atomic Blonde co-star Charlize Theron.
Prisoners of the Ghostland, like so much of Sono’s work, rejects authority in favour of a strange kinship between weirdos, outcasts, and degenerates. The Governor’s world is a selfdescribed “Animal Farm” – and when he asks for “America”, what arrives is a bag of dollar bills that he can fling at the women he feels entitled to own. But all this power must come at someone else’s expense, and Ghostland becomes the shadow of history that can’t be so easily shaken off, as its people pull helplessly on the arm of a giant clock to try and stop it from ticking. If time is allowed to move forward, it moves only towards their total destruction. Sono may indulge in madness, but it’s not madness without reason.
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