Navot Papushado

(Netflix Streaming, November 2022) By now, any (hypothetical) regular reader of my movie reviews should be tired of my standard rant against “men are garbage” movies—those weirdly hailed films portraying all female characters as virtuous or likable and all male characters as scum in a way that would clearly be misogynistic if the genders were flipped. It’s a surprisingly common trope these days, and I can’t wait for it to be seen for the mean-spirited sexist tripe it is. Gunpowder Milkshake definitely belongs to that subgenre: Its protagonists are female, its murderous antagonists are male, and moral alignment generally follows gender roles. (The occasional exception, such as the soon-to-die father, merely reinforces the overall message.)  But unlike other “men are garbage” movies, Gunpowder Milkshake has one crucial quality—it’s a lot of fun. It’s not completely self-absorbed in its message, it’s almost restrained in the way it gleefully murders males, and it makes some great casting choices along the way. I mean—a scene in which Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett play librarians who are secretly a front for a secret sisterhood of assassins? Yes! Written and directed with energy by Navot Papushado, Gunpowder Milkshake is at its best when it goes full bore in action movie tropes, ripping off everything it can from John Wick as a starter and topping itself at each successive action sequence. The clichés are big, the moral alignment of the film is non-existent (the protagonist gets a huge pass from another character for killing her father—but that’s okay, since he’s a male!) and we’re clearly closer to live-action cartoon than anything credible, but the result is a decently entertaining action film with strong art direction, a few original ideas (both structural and on a moment-to-moment action-beat basis) and plenty of attitude. There are a few wrong notes and missed opportunities here (most notably, Karen Gillan is a bit bland here—I can think of many other actresses her age who would have been more distinctive) and I obviously won’t let the “men are garbage” thing go. But in that subgenre, Gunpowder Milkshake is much better than average, and it’s the kind of action film meant to make fans happy until the next remarkable one rolls around.