Every week, Shelf Life sees Tom White select and talk about a movie that lives on his DVD shelf, one he thinks we should all see.
After receiving critical acclaim and numerous awards for co-writing The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie was noticeably absent from the cinematic landscape. You may know him now for Jack reacher and Edge of Tomorrow, but back in the late nineties, he was unsuccessfully trying to get a biopic of Alexander the Great off the ground, not wanting his success with Bryan Singer's classic thriller to typecast him as 'a crime guy'. But, as the story goes, it took a cup of coffee with Benico Del Toro to change his mind, which sent him to work on his directorial debut, an action/crime thriller which turned everything we know about the usual hero dynamic on it's head. This was movie was 2000's The Way of the Gun.
Pitched as a modern day Western, our 'heroes' are Ryan Phillipe and Benico Del Toro's Parker and Longbaugh (the real last names of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid), two drifters who will do anything for a profitable pay day. From the opening scene, where Parker punches out an extremely annoying and foul mouthed Sarah Silverman, we know these are not nice guys. They are down right despicable actually, kidnapping Robin (Juliette Lewis), the surrogate mother for a rich couple, so they can ransom her back for $15 million. They aren't traditionally sympathetic characters, trusting no one (at times not even each other), and generally being total sociopaths. But you find yourself feeling for them, mainly down to them being the one of only two constants in a tale full of twists, ulterior motives, and it's fair share of double crosses. The only other halfway noble character is James Cann's aging fixer who is sent in to make sure everything run smoothly by Robin's benefactor, Hale Chiddick (Scott Wilson, a million miles away from his most famous role as the kindly Herschel in The Walking Dead). He may make way through the world one savage killing at a time, but he has a set of rules which makes him the most likable character in this nest of ugly souls. There may be little who the audience can root for in The Way of The Gun, but it's a credit to McQuarrie's writing that each character is so fleshed out that everything they do feels right and natural, and we are compelled to stick with them till the violent, bloody end.
Coming out in a time when every crime thriller felt and sounded like it came from the pen of Quentin Tarantino, The Way of the Gun does seem to echo him at times, but McQuarrie's script goes far beyond his influence and into something all it's own. The movie excels at the quiet moments, with the zippy, entertaining dialogue being shot, rapid fire, between the characters. Dialogue isn't the only feather in it's cap, with McQuarrie delivering some hard hitting, realistic action throughout. Each shoot out is constructed with realism in mind. Nearly every round is accounted for, characters reload when they should, and there is only one moment where characters spray their environment with a hail of bullets, an intentional and fun nod to classic action movies. It's not surprising to learn that a U.S. Navy Seal, McQuarrie's brother no less, was an advisor on the action scenes, making sure the characters moved and acted with precision. From the way Parker and Longbaugh conduct themselves during the shoot outs to the fact the only time a finger is on the trigger is when a character is willing to shoot someone, this attention to realism adding so much to the action.
