Get ready for the best film you’ve never heard of. Released to DVD on Jan 2, The Way of the Gun is destined to become a cult object among action buffs. It’s an ultra-violent, foul-mouthed, stylish film soleil (or sunit noir) that few people saw and that critics hated, but which happens to be one of the few well-written movies of 2000.
Representative of the media’s response were Roger Ebert, who called the film a “heedlessly overplotted post-Tarantino bloodfest,” and The Oregonian‘s Kim Morgan, who opined, “We understand [that the director] aspires toward meaningful complications, but with all the people and words in the way nothing sticks.” Yes, folks, they’re attacking a movie that’s too written.
But as director and writer Christopher McQuarrie (who won an Oscar for writing The Usual Suspects) was at pains to explain in the November Sight and Sound, his action thriller is actually a refutation of the easy violence and empty posing of Tarantino and his disciples. As Benicio del Toro laments in the film, today’s violence poseurs “want to be criminals more then they want to commit crime.”
The plot is much clearer than the reviewers suggest. Two drifters (del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) kidnap a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) and ransom her to the prospective father (the venerable Scott Wilson). A criminal himself, he asks his enforcer, Joe Sarno (James Caan) to make things right. Naturally, things go awry for almost everyone, and there are connections between many of the characters that are not apparent upon first viewing.
Yes, this is masculinist stuff; but it also confounds expectations. It’s about quiet competence and Hemingwayesque grace under pressure. del Toro and Phillippe, whose characters take the names of Butch and Sundance, communicate with each other almost wordlessly. And instead of Tarantino, the film’s roots lie in Sam Peckinpah, who liked nothing more than to rip the guts out of a guy with bullets under the hot sun, while lamenting how standards in criminal conduct and violence were falling everywhere.
Artisan Entertainment honored this unusual film by loading the disc ($24.98) with extras. Besides the usual stuff (letterboxing, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, closed captioning) the disc also comes with an entertaining, if also somewhat sheepish, audio commentary by the director, and an isolated music track of the superb score with commentary by composer Joe Kraemer. There’s also a deleted scene, and the theatrical trailer. All help celebrate this fantastic film, for The Way of the Gun is the wave of the future.