The Way Of The Gun - Overestimating the Audience

Apr

9

The Way Of The Gun - Overestimating the Audience

≡ Category: Action, Comedy, Drama, Movie Reviews By Country, United States, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Action/Drama/Comedy
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Year: 2000

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

After the critical and popular success of The Usual Suspects, writer Christopher McQuarrie got a chance to direct his script The Way Of The Gun.

There’s a lot to like about The Way Of The Gun. The dialog is frequently inventive and amusing, McQuarrie comes up with plot complications that generate a lot of suspense and tension, and the action scenes have a fair amount of kineticism, considering that McQuarrie is a first-time director.

But McQuarrie makes the rarest of mistakes in Hollywood — he overestimates the ability of the audience to process non-visual information on the fly. I have no doubt that, on the page, The Way Of The Gun makes sense all of the way through. But, at many points through the movie, my reaction was “Huh?” Information critical to the understanding of character relationships and crucial plot points slipped through my fingers at least a half a dozen times. That’s deadly. And it’s not entirely the fault of the overly cryptic dialog.

Take the opening sequence, which is quite amusing. I won’t spoil it for you by telling you about it in detail, but suffice it to say that our two heroes, Mr. Parker and Mr. Longbaugh (one of many allusions to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sprinkled throughout the movie), get the tar beaten out of them. In the special features of the DVD, I discovered that the original script had a voiceover that served to explain the actions of our heroes in the opening sequence, and also shed light on a recurring theme in the movie. Apparently, Christopher McQuarrie felt that the point of the scene was self-explanatory and ditched the voiceover. He was wrong. Instead of this opening scene establishing the tone of the movie, we’re left with just a funny scene in isolation.

Later on, there’s a scene in a sperm bank, in which Mr. Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Mr. Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro) overhear a conversation that will lead to them kidnapping a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) and trying to ransom the baby. Director McQuarrie keeps the camera on our heroes so that we can witness their reaction to the information. That puts the burden on the audience to put the information in context without any visual aids whatsoever.

The easiest information for an audience to process is visual. Any director worth his salt knows you can cut tons of dialog if you have the right images. On the other hand, the most difficult information for an audience to process is language in isolation, especially if that language reveals philosophy, strategic planning, the state of mind of people who aren’t speaking, in other words, analytical or conceptual information. Writer McQuarrie forces the audience to drink this information through a firehose and director McQuarrie fails to mitigate the inherent difficulty of this task with appropriate visuals.

The result is that The Way Of The Gun, for all of it’s gunfights, and scenes of excruciating tension, feels like a very long movie. That’s what you get when you repeatedly confuse an audience. That’s why The Way Of The Gun, which has a number of very commercial elements, was consigned to the art theater ghetto during it’s theatrical run. That’s probably a large part of the reason that Christopher McQuarrie is only now getting an opportunity to direct another film (The Stanford Prison Experiment).

It should tell Christopher McQuarrie something that the single most effective moment of his movie is a visual joke. During a gunfight at a Mexican whorehouse, Mr. Parker dives over the wall of an empty fountain to evade a hail of bullets. You think you’ve witnessed this scene a hundred times, but McQuarrie puts a hilarious spin on it that makes it brand new. It’s laugh out loud funny.

If the rest of the movie were as lucid and entertaining, The Way Of The Gun would be a Trash Cinema classic. As it is, The Way Of The Gun is fitfully entertaining, but by the time the credits rolled, I had a splitting headache.