Hotshot girls miss the target
There’s no doubt that the eccentrically titled Gunpowder Milkshake begins in style but, sadly, it’s a style we’ve seen many times before. Yes, once again, the deadly assassin has been given a dark, tongue-in-cheek, film-noir makeover, a genre pioneered by the likes of Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) but reprised and recycled by others many times since.
Initially, the fact that director and co-writer Navot Papushado has gone, not just with a female killer but with an almost entirely female cast led by Karen Gillan, Lena Headey and Angela Bassett, prompts inevitable comparisons with Black Widow, Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad and TV’s Killing Eve.
But a more banal truth soon kicks in – this is essentially a female John Wick, only with the willowy Gillan doing the deadly dispatching rather than Keanu Reeves. Which means she’s also the one being chased by an army of Russian gangsters, of course.
There are a couple of nice action sequences – a chase in a multi-storey car park where one of the cars is steered by an eightyear-old girl is well handled, as is a climactic and inevitable shoot-out. But these are the exceptions in an otherwise disappointing and derivative production where the screenplay often seems slow and heavyhanded, the characterisation weak and a sense of déjà vu is impossible to shake off.
Rose Plays Julie is a dark psychological drama from Ireland where the creative ‘volume’ has been set high; maybe a tad too high in the end. But, my goodness, it’s good: beautifully photographed, cleverly written by
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (who also codirect) and nicely acted by a cast led by Orla Brady, Aidan Gillen and Ann Skelly.
Skelly plays Rose, an attractive young veterinary student inclined to melancholy and dark thoughts but also brooding on a loss. That loss turns out to be that of her birth mother, Ellen (Brady) – now an actress based in London – who gave her up as a baby. But when the increasingly obsessional Rose tracks down Ellen… well, that’s when the real trouble starts. Impressive, grown-up stuff.
Nicolas Cage has made many bonkers films but Prisoners Of The Ghostland is surely the most bonkers yet. But, fair’s fair, this multi-layered, visually inventive extravaganza won me over in the end. For sheer creative audacity, if nothing else.
It’s directed by the maverick Japanese film-maker, Sion Sono, who sets his impossible to summarise story in a stylised town presided over by a whitesuited ‘Governor’, and where the mask-wearing, ball-tossing inhabitants act as a kabuki-like chorus. It looks even stranger than it sounds.
And then a convicted bank robber – inevitably played by Cage – is dispatched into the surrounding, and possibly cursed, post-apocalyptic Ghostland to bring back a missing girl while wearing an explosive suit designed to blow off selected parts of his body should he fail.
Debts to Time Bandits, Mad Max and Kill Bill (yes, again) are obvious, but it does feature one of the funniest speeches Cage has surely ever delivered on screen. Sadly, not one that can be shared in a family newspaper.
Finally, I normally love a bit of nostalgic sporting Americana but 12 Mighty Orphans – the true story of an orphanage football team from Texas that captured the nation’s hearts during the Great Depression – proved too sentimental for me and something of a waste of a cast, led by Luke Wilson and Martin Sheen. Shame.