Gunpowder Milkshake

We previously said that we’re in a run of female lead action movies. Starting with Jolt from Amazon Prime, Kate from Netflix and now Sky (or Netflix depending on your location) throw their hat in the ring with Gunpowder Milkshake.

Gunpowder Milkshake has Karen Gillan (“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”, “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2”) as Sam, an assassin who is happy working alone.

Her handler is Nathan, Paul Giamatti (“Sideways”, “12 Years A Slave”), who himself is working for a group of older men who seem to decide on the targets.

Right from the get-go we are thrown into the action and see Sam doing what she does best, dispatching a large amount of people with barely a scratch. The issue is that one of the people she dispatches is the son of Jim, Ralph Ineson (“The Green Knight”, “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)”).

Jim happens to be the head of a large cartel and, despite not being happy with what his son was up to, he was his only son, and he isn’t happy and he wants revenge, he wants to do despicable things to Sam as revenge.

Sam’s position goes from bad to worse when she is sent to another job to kill someone who has stolen from Nathan and co. However, she discovers that the man in question stole to pay a ransom after some men took his daughter Emily, Chloe Coleman (“My Spy”, “Upload (TV)”).

She ‘accidentally’ kills the man and now has his daughter in tow, feeling guilty and some empathy for the girls situation which echoes her own.

Anyway, fast forward a little and we have Nathan issuing a kill order against Sam, which sees a whole host of assassins coming for her, alongside Jim’s men too.

Sam winds up reunited with her estranged mother Scarlet, Lena Headey (“The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)”, “Game of Thrones (TV)”), who, in turn, reunites with the librarians Madeleine, Carla Gugino (“San Andreas”, “Elizabeth Harvest”), Anna May, Angela Bassett (“Soul”, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”) and Florence, Michelle Yeoh (“Star Trek: Discovery (TV)”, “Crazy Rich Asians”).

The library is where you go when you need some weaponry, and the ladies seem to be unaffiliated to any particular faction, but are keen on keeping Sam and Scarlet alive.

There’s plenty of humour in Gunpowder Milkshake; a nice turn from Michael Smiley (“Jawbone”, “Rogue One”) as Dr. Ricky and some hapless assassins leads to some japes and Emily adds her own humour with her child\’s eye view of killing.

Navot Papushado (“Big Bad Wolves”, “Rabies”) is the director and co-wrote alongside Ehud Lavski. Papushado shows some nice flair at times and, most importantly, allows us to see the action, no shaky cam here.

If there’s a flaw with Gunpowder Milkshake it’s that, at just shy of two hours in runtime, it’s too long and there are too many moments of ‘downtime’, where the tone of the movie changes and it slows down that little too much.