Tarantino influence everywhere in Karen Gillans new assassin flick

GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE, ★★★★ MA, 114 minutes, in cinemas July 15

Israeli director Navot Papushado is a typical “movie brat”. His interviews about his artistic apprenticeship are peppered with so many admiring references to his filmmaking forebears that you wonder how he ever came up for air.

Karen Gillan and Chloe Colemann in Gunpowder Milkshake.Credit:

Gunpowder Milkshake is his second feature and you can see Quentin Tarantino’s influence everywhere. It’s in the film’s deadpan tone and breezy conjunction of violence and mordant jokes. And to underline its remoteness from the real world, there’s its setting â€" a timeless confection of past and present located in a city that could be somewhere in Europe if it weren’t for the unmistakeably American bowling alley and the diner where much of the plot unfolds.

It’s about a team of female assassins who go to war with their former employers, a crime syndicate known only as The Firm. The team’s base is a library, of all things, chosen because Papushado thought he could make a metaphor out of it. If knowledge is power, why not turn a library into an armoury and hide weapons in with the books? Get it? Perhaps not. But Papushado is out to indulge his imagination here and stretching a metaphor to snapping point is all part of the game.

And it’s quite a game. He’s not just paying homage to Tarantino. He’s matching him with the ingenuity of his action sequences and the sharpness of his dialogue. And he has assembled a terrific cast. The librarians â€" keepers of the armoury as well as the film’s fiercely feminist ethos â€" are Angela Bassett as Anna May, who wields a pair of hammers to devastating effect, Michelle Yeoh as Florence, who prefers to wrap her adversaries in chains, and British actress Carla Gugino as Madeleine, an Agatha Christie fan who favours a machine gun and a tomahawk.

But the stars are Karen Gillan (Jumanji) as Sam, who has been raised as an assassin by The Firm and has now gone rogue, and Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey. Headey plays Sam’s mother, the equally deadly Scarlet, who was forced by The Firm to abandon her as a child. Now she’s returned just in time to help her daughter outwit its seemingly inexhaustible army of hitmen.

While Papushado shares Tarantino’s taste for bloodletting, he’s even more intent on infusing everything he does with wit. He applies a literal meaning to the phrase crash course, for instance, when Sam is forced into giving a driving lesson to the eight-year-old girl she’s trying to protect â€" a sequence that starts as a carpark ambush and rapidly accelerates into a car chase.

It’s a very fast ride but the fun doesn’t depend on speed alone. The words are even more important.

Sandra Hall is a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Share this post