Review of The Way of the Gun (2000) by Paul Z — 30 Apr 2009

Phillippe and Del Toro may be the most interesting pair of screen outlaws of any canon. They are not simply stoic action figures, nor are they a wisecracking Mamet- or Tarantino-ized set of partners in crime. They are a distillation of greed and its adoption of senseless violence. They are completely self-driven, greedy, senseless and content to be so, yet we invest ourselves in following them as protagonists because we identify with their feelings of basic need: Survival, thus money, thus violence. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie doesn't even bother to make any effort whatsoever to ingratiate them to us, but in fact the very opposite. "We don't want your forgiveness. We don't want your absolution. We will not accept your natural order.".

There is an obvious but charming symbolic counterpoint to the two main characters in the implicit bond of the bodyguards played by Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt. We are given just as omniscient a probing of these two as of Phillippe and Del Toro, only they seem to come from more affluent society. They may have a more affected look and vernacular (spare though it may be) than the two thugs they mean to dispatch, but they suggest that the troublemaking self-preservation gene is innate. Which pair overpowers the other is a matter of who has less to lose. The result of their actions, and their crossing paths, is an Old West lifestyle wreaking havoc on the modern day. Joe Kraemer's mostly percussive score evokes such a setting. There's even a climactic shootout at a brothel in Mexico.

Scott Wilson plays a wealthy man who has made a complacent agreement with his dark side and an underworld economy to afford a comfortable home with a family, no matter how artificial that family may be. Really, it seems no one truly cares about whether or not his unborn adoptive daughter's surrogate mother, played with a persuasive necessity by Juliette Lewis, lives or dies, as long as the baby she carries lives, at least for as long as any one of them feels they need it. Only do Diggs and Katt persist in salvaging Lewis and the baby directly, because it is their job, and the kidnappers Phillippe and Del Toro shot at them. Christopher McQuarrie's exceedingly interesting buried gem, freely sprinkled with the blackest of humor, is permeated with an existential lack of cognitive dissonance on the part of any of his characters. How are the two lead characters morally superior to any other character, or perhaps even equivalent? Why do we concentrate on their intentions? Because they're the ones the movie happens to follow, because they are an unadorned version of what the rest of them are who have put on or been endowed with airs.

What does all this mean? Why should we care about the baby due Scott Wilson and his wife named Francesca, who isn't even faithful? She sits comfortably in a high-tech room in her lavish digs as everyone else puts themselves on the line for the baby she's not even having herself. Well, they don't see it that way. Things may work out for her, but not because they care about her or her child by proxy. They have their own needs in line with hers, almost like karma is holding the door for her. "Karma's only justice without the satisfaction," muses an older, craggier James Caan, whose character seems to have fully mastered the lifestyle intended by the story's said opposing duos, but only ever seen to anyone else as the "bag man." This princess in the castle may not even be touched by the incidents that take place in her favor, but "Isn't it how it is," Phillippe laments for more inscrutable reasons. "Your prayers are always answered...in the order they're received.".