Just the Ticket #112: Two Great Tastes?

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a The Ticketmaster

Just ask the local gentry; not everything can go together like love and marriage, a horse and carriage, peanut butter and chocolate (or jelly), or Canadian bacon and pineapple. As someone who eats peanut butter sandwiches with mayo and bananas, and likes pineapple on pizza, I'm probably not the epicurean expert some of you are looking for. But I've also never eaten love, marriage, horsemeat, or any part of a carriage (I don't possess nearly the level of demonic power or the dentition for those feats of philosophical gluttony), so I at least have some degree of sanity working in my favor.

On to today's movie selection!

In the tradition of subpar female-empowerment revenge fantasies like Peppermint and sexploitation video games like Lolipop Chainsaw, Netflix's RNG algorithm has regurgitated, for your viewing...viewing, Gunpowder Milkshake. Spoilers be damned, but watch it if you must.

In a world that is equal parts Kill Bill, Kingsman, Mr. & Mrs Smith, and John Wick, John Wick is a teenage girl whose mother was also John Wick before she abandoned her and/or died because assassins in a world where everyone is and/or works for an assassin can't have stable home lives. Okay, so maybe the "equal parts" thing isn't entirely accurate; Gunpowder Milkshake is clearly trying to be a female-led, light beer knockoff of John Wick, with a diluted aesthetic hodgepodge of everything else lacquered on top.

Jane Wick, Jr. (not her actual character name, and I don't feel like making the effort to remind myself if she even has one) is played by the MCU's Karen Gillan, and her mother (ditto the not remembering names, ditto not making the effort to do so...) is played by Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Game Of Thrones star Lena Headey. After years of searching for her mother and/or the people who may or may not have killed her (it's hard to tell if she cares most of the time, and so neither should the audience), our algorithmically selected, optionally anti, optionally heroine meets with a slimy crime boss (Paul Giamatti, because Ray Winstone and John Goodman weren't available?), in the Pulp Fiction diner that serves as this world's shop-talk neutral zone, to receive a contract on Generic Accounting Nerd #314,159 (mmm..., pie...), who stole a lot of money from The Organization (because generically ominous-sounding criminal bureaucracies are criminally bureaucratic and ominously generic, and The Algorithm likes words). But because tropes, she finds out that GAN-pi has a daughter, and attempts to save them from her competition/babysitters and recover the skimmed money all at once. But because cake can only be cake before the eat-and-shit process, and because anti-herovilline, she ends up having to explode Mr. GAN-pi behind his daughter's back anyway and "rescue" the girl from his "killers." Somewhere along the way, with a flat-fallen scene that involves a failed Three Stooges audition, duct tape, guns, and zoological muscle relaxers, but no explanation or semblance of character development beyond "cuz I wanna," the girl is now protégé to her father's real killer. So we're ripping off The Professional and Mercy Dante now, too? Great! Butt weight, there's more! Mom Wick wasn't dead after all! Who could have seen that coming? Oh, and Carla Gugino (Sucker Punch), Angela Bassett (Critters 4), and Michelle Yeoh (Boss Level and Shang-Chi and the Legend Of the Ten Rings) run a "bookstore" that, despite being very large, flashy, and publicly accessible (and presumably every book has a weapon hidden amongst its pages), has never been subject to a lawsuit by its civilian patronage. Logistics? We don't need no steenkeen logistics! It makes a great setpiece for the final shootout, though. The uncut gun-fu fight in a disco-lit bowling alley early on is pretty okay, too. It's as good at showing off the film's above average hand-to-hand choreography as its fetishistic appreciation for selective coloring and neon, like a gay diner threw up on Shadow Fight during a midnight screening of The Big Lebowski.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

D+

I am currently working my way through the Infinity Saga and trying to squeeze one more class out of this semester, so no Just the Ticket until further notice. October is going to be packed, though, so there's something to look forward to.

Ticketmaster,

Out.