The Way of the Gun (2000)
Written and Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Starring Benicio del Toro, Ryan Phillippe, Juliette Lewis, James Caan

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The screenwriters of 2 Fast 2 Furious once said their movie was intended to be received as a meditation on trauma and regret in an action blockbuster environment that never took the time to ask "Who was in that car that just got taken out by the antagonist's rocket launcher? Did she have a family? Was she on her way to a job interview that could have turned her life around?"

That's a lie, of course. But for a moment reading that, you may have thought any overly intellectual viewpoint on a movie where Ludacris arranges illegal street races would be self-important and haughty. As much as I love hearing an artist discuss their work, I'm constantly cautious that I'll hit the landmine of pretension. Sometimes it's huge. You're making your way through an artists' statement and the Russo brothers describe their work as "devoid of external influence" and cite Truffaut while promoting their awful bank robbery/prison movie Cherry. Sometimes it's just a writer saying their light, fluffy movie is deeper than you realized. It always informs things, if only a little, because it forces me to reckon with a missed mark. To hear writer-director Christopher McQuarrie tell it, his 2000 directorial debut The Way of the Gun is an intense examination of unlikable characters that spits in the eyes of every studio exec who demanded he smooth off his scripts' edges, a statement piece about his refusal to compromise. When I watch Way of the Gun, I think "that's a messy action film that makes some smart choices." There's the version of this movie that exists-- an okay film in the post-Tarantino wave with some great action-- and there's the movie in McQuarrie's head-- a meditation on violence and betrayal that's a little more rough than it needed to be. I like Way of the Gun. If its creator hadn't explained the motive behind every one of its frames, I might like it more.

McQuarrie's own story makes him easy to root for. He made two features with Bryan Singer, a truly cursed human being to be connected to, and won an Oscar for the second of them. That movie, The Usual Suspects was the kind of hit that gets ruined for you if you don't see it on opening night. It's hard to assess it as a film when you know its famous twist years before you finally see the movie. The Usual Suspects was a big deal for its key creators. It got fellow cursed man Kevin Spacey the Best Supporting Actor Oscar and its success helped set Singer up to launch the modern superhero franchise film with X-Men. McQuarrie, certain his acclaim and award wins would act as a blank check, spent five years working on projects that never got close to production. Hollywood wanted him to make another Usual Suspects and McQuarrie wanted to direct a swords and sandals epic about Alexander the Great. After enough studio notes and rejection, he decided to make a Trojan horse film that would seem like a return to his past success with crime while subtly poking back at the idea that all the killers in his stories needed to be slick, cool and likable. That's The Way of the Gun.

And so star Ryan Phillippe runs around the movie yelling things like "Shut that cunt's mouth before I come over there and fuckstart her head." Phillippe is Parker and Benicio del Toro is Longbaugh and in the first scene, they anger a crowd of bystanders and beat up two women. As the crowd closes in, they're pulverized and the credits roll. In the next scene, they're fine. The big opening is purely here to establish tone, its narrative impact not even extended to bruises on the characters' faces. There's no subtext, no twist. They're assholes.

Parker and Longbaugh (the last names of the real Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid), live cheap and on the road. Phillippe is doing a weird half-swallow voice here, like a macho version of Elizabeth Holmes. They make their money doing petty crimes and selling blood and semen. At a clinic, they hear about a rich couple (Scott Wilson and Kristin Lehman) who are paying a surrogate (Juliette Lewis) one million dollars to carry their child. Our protagonists (never "our heroes") plan to kidnap the surrogate, Robin, during a routine doctor check-up.

From here, things get more complicated. The Way of the Gun is thirty minutes of action, an hour of foreshadowing and set-up, and then thirty minutes of McQuarrie's version of the big Peckinpah finale. The first issue comes quick, as Parker and Longbaugh realize the rich couple are mobbed up and have armed guards (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) at all times. The rich couple are truly loaded-- they have armed guards (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) on Robin at all times. Every subsequent complication either involves the introduction of a new character (James Caan's bagman Sarno, Dylan Kussman's Dr. Painter) or the revelation of a relationship between characters (Sarno is Robin's father, the Taye Diggs bodyguard is having an affair with his boss' wife). Like any Tarantino rip-off, the various personalities pile up until there are almost too many to keep straight, and then they go about shooting each other.

You feel those shots, too. The gun fights are slow, with people taking cover and calling locations out to each other. In most 90s action films, the killers are superheroes. They make impossible shots and dodge bullets. Here, ammo gets spilled strategically and it rips through people with a level of gore that reads too real to allow anybody to think it's cool. When the Phil LaMarr character gets shot in the head in Pulp Fiction, it's shocking and hilarious. Alexis Arquette jumps out of a back room and gets blown away by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, who are framed to look as cool as possible. Here, James Caan's character shoots both Parker and Longbaugh in the legs and it looks horrible. They fall down uncomfortably and bleed out in the dirt.

Some people love the realism. I don't really care either way. It's neat to watch a film's action move differently than what you're used to seeing, but I've also never been annoyed that movie characters have unrealistically strong shot accuracy or that the random background thugs in a Cannon Films shoot-out aren't following military protocol when they run at Dolph Lundgren with their uzis. This kind of realism earns you appreciative fans. Here's some trivia from the Way of the Gun IMDb page: "When their long guns run out of ammo, Parker and Longbaugh are seen sweeping them behind their strong side to access their handguns. About the time the film was made most tactical instructors began looping their three point slings over the weak side shoulder so that when released, the gun would tilt over to the weak side and enable an easier draw of the back-up handgun. Now, many prefer a simple two point sling rigged the same way, which enables better movement and fewer entanglements." A person watched this film and then submitted trivia about everybody "using the Weaver stance of combat handgunning." That's very odd.

That anal level of fussiness extends to the overwritten dialogue. When asked what she calls her unborn baby, Juliette Lewis responds, "When you think about deaf people, people who are born deaf, who've never heard a spoken word. What do you think they call the sun or their mother, or their own reflection in the mirror? That's what I call it."

You hear a person say that and don't know how McQuarrie was ever thought of a shiny, new talent. Deaf people have a word for sun, and it's "sun." ASL exists.

Later, one character asks another if they believe in karma. The response: "Karma's only justice without the satisfaction. I don't believe in justice." That might sound cool for a moment, but what does it mean? Why is karma devoid of satisfaction? You could just as easily have written "Justice is only karma without the satisfaction" and it would be just as coherent. The whole movie is like that. The rules to the card game Hearts are introduced as a sloppy metaphor for emotional detachment. Benicio del Toro does his twitchy, dazed mumbling thing where you aren't sure if he's putting in any effort or simply Johnny Depping it up. You can enjoy this movie, but you need to turn your brain off.

Which brings us back to McQuarrie's stated intention of making a film with unlikable characters. That was his revolutionary act with Way of the Gun. You see some horrible things in this film. Parker and Longbaugh tie a hostage to a makeshift rack with barbed wire and Parker shouts that he's going to cut the hostage's eyelids off and pour gasoline on him from time to time to keep him awake through the torture. Not likable! I don't think that's any less likable than Reservoir Dogs' Mr. Blonde cutting a cop's ear off with a straight razor and coming within seconds of setting him on fire. Quentin Tarantino, the originator of so much of the "90s cool" critics say this film is railing against, ended his first movie with a bunch of unlikable characters shooting each other to death. He already made the movie McQuarrie thought he was making here.

The Way of the Gun also misunderstands the nuances of likability. To a certain kind of viewer, an unlikable protagonist is more appealing than a generically "good" one if they're portrayed as an effective badass. This is the entire premise behind nü-metal and Marilyn Manson and some DMX videos and, later, the Heath Ledger take on the Joker. The idea that an imagined conservative mom and dad would drop their monocles over a character's actions made them likable to a large audience. People watched Walter White do terrible things on Breaking Bad and walked away thinking he was supposed to be cool.

Todd Solondz protagonists are genuinely unlikable. Johnny Fletcher in Naked is unlikable. Mark Zuckerberg and Lydia Tár, condescending to the world they're sure owes them something, are unlikable. Casual sadism and a cruelty that curdles into nihilism aren't going to qualify these characters' likability to anybody who's seen enough violence in movies to recognize that it isn't real. Casual murder is easy to write. Complicated off-putting behavior is not. The Way of the Gun guys aren't unlikable so much as they're assholes, and there's a big difference.

Likability is also relative, anyway. If everybody in a film is scummy, none of them seem that bad in comparison to the others. Juliette Lewis' character is an innocent victim, but when she isn't in a scene, it's all miserable people threatening to shoot other miserable people. The Zuckerberg of The Social Network is unlikable because he's always around Eduardo Saverin. If everything is supposed to be shocking, then nothing is.

In the movie's best scene, its big climax, Dr. Painter performs a c-section on Robin while her bodyguards protect them from Parker and Longbaugh. Sarno and his men descend on the place. They're all holed up in an empty Mexican brothel with a big, beautiful Western courtyard, but for the first half of the scene, the action is confined to a series of small, connected rooms with thin walls. McQuarrie takes the time to show us how large the space is and then he zooms in on a few slivers of it, which makes everything all the more claustrophobic and hectic. It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking and makes a great unintentional audition for McQuarrie's future as the director of four Mission: Impossible films.

That is an effective contrast, heightening one subject's features by sitting it next to its inverse. And I wouldn't care about how rare that is if its creator hadn't set me up to expect more.

• The Year is 2000: Ryan Phillippe would star in other movies, but this was the first where he was trying to be a serious actor. And that isn't me being smarmy, that's what he said. Phillippe pursued the role and wouldn't take a "no" from McQuarrie. When the writer-director asked him why he wanted to be in an ugly, violent crime movie when he was getting bigger offers, Phillippe reportedly answered, "There are a lot of people trying to make me a movie star, and I'm an actor." Twenty-three years and several abuse allegations later, I don't know if he's much of either.

• Tarantino defectors: Juliette Lewis played a similar role (young woman who has to be protected by two hardened criminals) in From Dusk Til Dawn

• Weirdest member of the ensemble: Sarah Silverman plays a homophobic (everybody in this movie is homophobic) shit-starter who spends the opening scene swearing at Phillippe and del Toro. That's her in the "most ridiculous line of dialogue" bullet point below.

• Weirdest pop culture reference: As a director, Christopher McQuarrie references other movies, but his characters don't discuss pop culture. Besides a Rolling Stones song at the beginning of the film, this thing exists in a world without radios or TVs.

• Needledrop setpiece: None. That Rolling Stones song plays over basically nothing and isn't supposed to add style to any action or romance.

• Most Tarantino moment: Quentin probably wishes he had thought to straight up giving the main characters of one of his movies the same names as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

• Innovations in the subgenre: Tarantino was already riffing on Westerns before he actually made any, but Way of the Gun is more explicit in just about every way. The protagonists are drifters, the climax is a final showdown set in a Mexican brothel, there's no real law to speak of, etc. I tend to subscribe to the Geof Darrow idea that every story can, thematically, be considered a Western, but Way of the Gun goes out of its way to take things in that direction.

• Most ridiculous line of dialogue: "You like to ass fuck, fontanella fuckin' baby head fuck? You like to fuck baby heads?"

• Where did the writer/director go? Nowhere and then everywhere. Christopher McQuarrie continued to work prolifically as a script doctor but didn't get another on-screen credit for eight long years, when he re-teamed with his buddy Bryan Singer for the World War 2 movie Valkyrie. I liked it enough at the time, but I'm in no hurry to revisit it. Fifteen years later, pretty much the only notable thing about Valkyrie was its role as an incubator for the friendship and creative partnership between its star, Tom Cruise, and McQuarrie. Cruise essentially put McQuarrie on retainer once filming was done, and McQuarrie has written or punched up every film Cruise has made since. McQuarrie has directed five films since (including the two upcoming Mission: Impossible movies that were filmed back-to-back a few years ago) and all have starred Cruise. He's got eleven writing credits post-Way of the Gun and nine are for Cruise projects. And those Mission: Impossible movies are terrific. Christopher McQuarrie is as much Tom Cruise's employee, as any of Cruise's assistants are, but it's resulted in some good action movies. And The Mummy.

• Left behind: Nicky Katt, who was in several Richard Linklater and Steven Soderbergh films but never broke out like he should have. Still, if you're going to be a go-to guy for two directors, those are perfect ones to have in your corner.

• Does it work? Mostly, but not for the reasons McQuarrie thought it did.