THE WAY OF THE GUN - a movie review

Before to become the director of the Jack Reacher franchise with Tom Cruise, Christopher MacQuarrie was the hottest screenwriter in town due to "Usual Suspects". Not only did he win an Oscar for that "tour de force", but it definitely established him as the script doctor around.

When i saw Jack Reacher, a couple of years ago, however, I wondered what had happened to him. I'm not saying that I would have liked him to keep churning out pages after pages from his office printer for the rest of his life. But I had hoped to find a bit more of the indomitable independant spirit of the Way of the Gun, one of the handsomest crime movie of the end of the 90s.

The Way of the Gun is barely remembered now and barely popped on the radar back then either. It feels like a movie that a studio decided to greenlight in order to give a break to his master writer for a while. This is a rogue movie. A rabid dog. At the image of his main protagonists.

We'll never know of their true names, but they call themselves Parker and Longbaugh. It won't take you long to notice that these are the true names of Cassidy and the Sundance King. So, prepare for a hell of a ride and a hell of a gunfight at the end. But no Peruvian army.

Parker and Longbaugh are petty criminals who live off the grid in a state of constant anarchy. Their goal in life is unclear but their philosophy is to be as self-sufficient as possible, and to depend from no one else than themselves and their wits. No credit cards, no social security, no employment. Cash and cash only. The kind of criminals who are too young and too good looking to be true. And it does not help that they are played with a charming abandon by a pouty Ryan Philips and a devilish Benicio del Toro in his period lean-and-mean.

However, they make up for those good looks by having no qualms and no shame. We'll never know how they met, we'll never know what they aspire too, other than a bunch of money, and as soon as they hear about a young woman who is surrogate mother for a wealthy family, they embark on a scheme to kidnap her, in order to ransom the baby.

Kidnapping movies are like a rubix cube. They always have the same elements and you can play with them all you like, you end up with a new variant every time (when they are well done). Here, the icing on the cake is of course that the kidnappers kidnap the baby of the mother, and for that they need to kidnap the mother herself. But the people who will pay don't really care for her. They only care for the baby. 

Maybe at times the story takes too much tangents. MacQuarrie wants to show a bit too much of his screenwriting credits. As any screenwriter who makes the big jump towards the director chair, he might be afraid to show off his screenwriting credits. However, he should not be! Because there is more intelligence and inventivity in his action scenes than 10 years of Michael Bay. 

If we forget about the final stand-off, which is much more muscles than brains, all the other scenes are millimetrically directed and filmed. It is a real pleasure to see these two low-cost gangsters play tricks of mind upon their more rich adversaries. You can't help rooting for them against the bad guys on their trail, who may be better dressed and better armed but are constantly on the backfoot

No wonders it will take nothing less than a wild bunch of similarly down-to-earth rascals led by James Caan to stop them once and for all.

And no, this is not a spoiler. In the first minutes of the movie, our two loveable rascals said it themselves. They fight a loosing battle. They will always lose. But they will always give a proper fight, with all they got. And this is as far as the morale of that movie go.