Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Gunpowder Milkshake arrives as a neon-soaked genre exercise, a female-fronted refashioning of the John Wick template in which the bullets are plentiful and the moral instruction is not. Karen Gillan plays Sam, a hitwoman whose arms are rendered useless at the midpoint, forcing her to tape a knife and a pistol to her hands and continue the evening's work. This is the film's idea of a character arc, and honestly, it holds up. The picture is stylish, loud, and entirely uninterested in telling us how to live.

Where social consciousness appears, it is structural instead of rhetorical. The ensemble is notably female and multiracial, with Lena Headey, Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett forming a sisterhood of assassins, and the mother-daughter estrangement supplies the emotional spine. Women here claim lethal agency at every turn, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for it. Race is simply present in the casting and absent as a subject. The villain is a crime syndicate called The Firm, complete with a human resources department that dispatches contract killers, which is a decent joke about corporate bureaucracy and nothing more than a joke.

The film declines the pulpit. There is no environmental sermon, no body-positivity subplot, no neurodivergent character, no LGBTQ romance, no revisionist history. It has the good manners to be an entertainment. The librarians who double as arms dealers are delightful. The eight-year-old who steers the getaway car while Sam works the pedals is a nice touch. The result is mayhem with a milkshake, and the cultural baggage stays in the lobby.