Mysterious gun-toting librarians pile what appear to be books into the arms of Sam (Karen Gillan), saying “you’ll need a Jane Austen… a Charlotte Brontë… and a Virginia Woolf. Oh, and an Agatha Christie. For reading.”
Inside, the books are carved out to hold a variety of firearms.
Gunpowder Milkshake features tropes from each of these classic writers’ work, all tied up inside a gritty noir involving a hired assassin, an organizational gang war caused by an erroneous kill request, and the 8-year-old daughter of a hired kill left targeted by multiple adversaries.
After being sent to kill and retrieve money from a man who stole from the organization she works for, Sam learns that he stole in order to pay the ransom for his daughter. Having been left an orphan with the organization after being abandoned by her mother at a 1950s diner popular with assassins, she prefers to save both the man and his daughter, Emily (Chloe Coleman). At the same time, her boss, Nathan (Paul Giamatti), discovers her last job led to the death of another crime boss’s son, leading both groups to hunt her and the child.
The best parts of this action-packed killing spree are the librarians. Played by Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, and Carla Gugino, this loving group of inventorialists play a familial role for Sam and Emily, as does Lena Headey, who returns later in the film as Sam’s mother. These four women show that being an assassin may not always be a reason to stop caring or being polite. Despite being rated R, the film’s writers chose not to use this as an excuse for foul language, but instead allow the librarians to clean up their language in front of children or hide the image of death and destruction happening around them.
All in all, these three generations of women fighting against multiple crime bosses creates a new genre of action film in this mother-daughter version of John Wick (where none of these characters would have let a dog die).
Gunpowder Milkshake is available to stream on Netflix.
