The Way of the Gun
USA 2000
Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
US, the present. At a fertility clinic where they intend to sell sperm samples, Parker and Longbaugh, two career criminals, overhear the whereabouts of surrogate mother Robin, who is carrying the child of a wealthy couple, Hale and Francesca Chidduck. Outwitting Robin's bodyguards Jeffers and Obecks, they kidnap Robin and head for Mexico. When Parker and Longbaugh learn from Robin's doctor Allen Painter that Chidduck is a crook who will do anything to get the baby (if not the mother) back, they demand a $15 million ransom.
Jeffers, who is having an affair with Francesca, and Obecks come after them; so does old-timer Joe Sarno, Chidduck's "adjudicator". After a shoot-out in a motel, during which Obecks is shot, Jeffers takes Robin to a remote Mexican hotel; there, he plans to wait for her to give birth, kill her and take the baby. Painter is on hand to deliver the baby. Before going into labour, Robin admits that the child is hers, and that Painter is the father. Parker and Longbaugh are wounded in another shoot-out. While performing a Caesarian operation on Robin, Painter shoots Jeffers dead.
Sarno arrives with the ransom money and a small army of henchmen, with whom Parker and Longbaugh have a pitched battle. Painter delivers Robin's baby. As they lie gravely wounded, Parker and Longbaugh realise that Sarno is Robin's father.
Francesca Chidduck informs her husband that she is pregnant.
Review
In The Way of the Gun the line between hero and villain is infinitesimally drawn. Parker and Longbaugh, as close as the film comes to good guys, are trigger-happy, cheerfully amoral petty hoodlums with a penchant for torture, robbery and blackmail. In the first sequence they needlessly pick a fight with a couple which ends with Parker punching out a woman. Later, they think nothing of kidnapping a heavily pregnant woman, an act for which they feel no remorse ("We didn't come for absolution. We didn't ask to be redeemed.") If they are morally ambiguous figures, the bad guys are even more unscrupulous: every character, from the criminal boss Chidduck to his sharp-suited goons, from the boss' wife to the surrogate mother who is carrying Chidduck's baby, has a hidden agenda. As in The Usual Suspects (scripted by The Way of the Gun's debut director Christopher McQuarrie) we're never quite sure who is deceiving whom; and just as The Usual Suspects had an anonymous, all-powerful deus ex machina in Keyser Soze, The Way of the Gun boasts one character, Sarno, who is several steps ahead of everybody else. Played by James Caan, Sarno is nicknamed "the adjudicator", Chidduck's Mr Fixit whose function isn't just to bring back the baby but to tie the disparate strands of the story together. He is also, almost by default, the moral centre of the film, the one character whose motives aren't primarily selfish.
The infuriatingly complex plotting of McQuarrie's script muddies what would otherwise seem like a straightforward latter-day Western. As in late Howard Hawks, here the gunplay is interspersed with long passages in which characters sit around talking. Caan is the paternal old-timer, giving advice to the two hot-headed hoodlums (a reversal from his role as a young gambler in Hawks' 1966 El Dorado). To emphasise the generational divide, McQuarrie casts several veteran actors opposite the young guns: the corrupt businessman Chidduck is played by Scott Wilson (one of the killers from Richard Brooks' 1967 film In Cold Blood) and Sarno's old partner by Geoffrey Lewis (a craggy veteran of many Clint Eastwood Westerns and the father of Juliette Lewis, who plays surrogate mother Robin).
Once Parker and Longbaugh cross the Mexican border, the film-making becomes more ritualistic and melodramatic, and McQuarrie loses his obsession with contriving elaborate plot twists. His main inspiration in these final stretches seems to be Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). Just as the old patriarch in that movie puts a grisly $1 million price tag on Alfredo Garcia's head, here Chidduck promises his hoodlums untold riches if they deliver him the baby he craves. There's an extraordinary birth scene in which Robin goes into labour in a dusty hotel room with mobsters for midwives and a doctor who doesn't know what he's doing. McQuarrie avoids the temptation to have Robin's new-born babe bring harmony to the proceedings, and the final shoot-out is as stylised and as far-fetched as any Spaghetti Western showdown. Not that McQuarrie downplays the effect of the violence (in one particularly gruesome scene, Parker has to pull shards of broken glass from his arm). But such brutal scenes are undercut with lyricism and deadpan wit, and make for a flamboyant, richly satisfying denouement to a film which that initially seems hobbled by its own self-consciously clever screenplay.
Credits
- Director
- Christopher McQuarrie
- Producer
- Kenneth Kokin
- Screenplay
- Christopher McQuarrie
- Director of Photography
- Dick Pope
- Editor
- Stephen Semel
- Production Designer
- Maia Javan
- Music
- Joe Kraemer
- ©Artisan Film Investors Trust
- Production Companies
- Artisan Entertainment presents a Aqaba production
- Executive Producer
- Russ Markowitz
- Production Supervisor
- Christine White
- Production Co-ordinator
- Ryan Cooke
- Production Manager
- Russ Markowitz
- Location Manager
- Michael Dungan
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Felicity Nove
- Co-ordinator:
- Jacquey Rosati
- 2nd Unit Director
- Kenneth Kokin
- Assistant Directors
- William Paul Clark
- Dawn Massaro
- Susie Balaban
- Script Supervisor
- Suzanne Bingham
- Casting
- Lynn Kressel
- Utah:
- Cate Praggastis
- ADR Voice:
- Loop Troop
- Caitlin McKenna
- Terri Douglas
- Camera Operator
- Ian Fox
- Digital Visual Effects
- BFTR Productions
- Special Effects
- F/X Concepts Inc
- Art Director
- Thomas Meyer
- Set Designer
- Linden Snyder
- Set Decorator
- Les Boothe
- Storyboard Artist
- Mark Bristol
- Costume Designers
- Genevieve Tyrrell
- Heather Neely McQuarrie
- Costume Supervisor
- Lanny Sikes
- Key Make-up
- Gina Homan
- Special Make-up Effects
- KNB EFX Group Inc
- Key Hair
- Erin Lyons
- Main/End Titles
- Title House Digital
- Score Performed by
- Seattlemusic
- Conductor
- Joe Kraemer
- Concertmaster
- Leonid Keylin
- Orchestrations
- Steven Ariscot
- Studio Co-ordinator
- Bonnie Reed
- Music Editor
- Lisé Richardson
- Mixing Engineer
- Armin Steiner
- Recordist
- John Burton
- 2nd Engineer
- Sam Hofstedt
- Latin Music Specialist
- Guillermo Hernandez
- Soundtrack
- "Rip This Joint" - The Rolling Stones; "Comin' on Thru" - Johnny Dilks; "Navidena/Holiday Girl", "Esperanza" - Casalando; "Fiesta" - Daniel Indart; "How to Make a Margarita" - Joe Kraemer; "Pinao Concerto No. 23A K.488" - Vienna Mozart Ensemble, piano: Daniel Gerard
- Sound Mixers
- Earl Stein
- Roger Davis
- Re-recording Mixers
- Chris David
- Chuck Michael
- Recordist
- Eddie Bydalek
- Engineer
- Michael Morongell
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Chuck Michael
- Lead Dialogue Editor
- Ulrika Akander
- Dialogue Editors
- Jane Boegel
- Barbara Boguski
- James Russell DeWolf
- Todd Niesen
- Sound Effects Editors
- Nash Michael
- Jay Wilkinson
- Scott A. Jennings
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- George Berndt
- Loop Group:
- Nicholas Guest
- Margo Hara
- Luisa Leschin
- Sal Lopez
- Jonathan Nichols
- Dyana Ortelli
- Steve Staley
- Marcelo Tubert
- Recordists:
- Laverne Dewberry
- Rick Canelli
- Diane Lucas
- Mixers:
- Troy Porter
- Thomas J. O'Connell
- Greg Steele
- Foley
- Artists:
- Alicia Irwin
- Dawn Fintor
- Mixer:
- David Betancourt
- Medical Consultants
- Dr Robert Katz
- Dr Lydia Hazan
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Gary Paul
- Technical/Weapons Adviser
- Doug McQuarrie
- Cast
- Ryan Phillippe
- 'Parker'
- Benicio Del Toro
- 'Longbaugh'
- Juliette Lewis
- Robin
- Taye Diggs
- Jeffers
- Nicky Katt
- Obecks
- Geoffrey Lewis
- Abner
- Dylan Kussman
- Dr Allen Painter
- Scott Wilson
- Hale Chidduck
- Kristin Lehman
- Francesca Chidduck
- James Caan
- Joe Sarno
- Henry Griffin
- P. Whipped
- Mando Guerrero
- federale 1
- Jan Jensen
- receptionist
- Andres Orozco
- federale 2
- José Perez
- federale 3
- Neil Pollock
- interviewer
- Irene Santiago
- sloppy prostitute
- Sarah Silverman
- raving bitch
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Momentum Pictures
- 10,733 feet
- 119 minutes 15 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe