The Way of the Gun

A very stylish affair. Characters rotten to the core, excellent acting experiences. The shootout at the end is a real gem. Wonderfully easy to follow, excellent build up to an awesome finale. Perhaps The Way of the Gun has unnecessarily many side stories; getting rid of a few characters might have meant the story moved along a little faster. (08/04/2012)

And what the fuck was that? McQuarrie has a special talent for shooting scenes in which the mischievous nickel-and-dime license cannot be distinguished from the deadly narrative seriousness. Largely because Joe Kraemer writes pathetic musical undertones for bizarre-looking scenes. So when an old pregnant lady limps through the hospital to the sound of gunfire, it's a funny scene, but the film wants to seem like it's being over-dramatic. It's not. For about half of the runtime, I wondered what The Way of the Gun was supposed to be about. Is it supposed to be a cool gangster film (it has escalations but no perspective)? Is it supposed to be a drama (then where are the convincing characters and motivations)? The result is extreme confusion, where lousy scenes (the heroine stares at the camera for a good minute for no apparent reason, the desperately dragged death knell of one of the characters in the car) alternate with good scenes. When The Way of the Gun seems to be content with being an extraordinarily transparent gangster film (is there a spectator at all who doesn't understand the relationships long minutes before they are revealed?), they pull out a kind of moral saber for guilt and forgiveness. The Babylonian confusion of words and motivations, however, sometimes has something like magnetism in places, which keeps your attention at least because the characters die both during the plague epidemic, and the final western shoot-out reveals that the director likes old genre classics. Del Toro and Kaan are also very good. Which is something that can't be said about the entire film... (12/19/2012)