The Way of the Gun (2000)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Two criminal drifters without sympathy get more than they bargained for after kidnapping and holding for ransom the surrogate mother of a powerful and shady man.
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What critics compared The Way of the Gun to
Unfortunately, it never does anything except refer to them, and the riffs -- even the good ones -- seem more like rip-off than homages: the gun battle from The Wild Bunch, the coffee-shop truce from Heat, the sniper from The Usual Suspects.
Usual Suspects writer McQuarrie turns writer-director for this twisted crime thriller that’s part Peckinpah and part Coen Brothers, with all the gunplay from Heat thrown in.
Sarno and Longbaugh have a conversation in the midst of the hostage crisis, not unlike the conversation between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in "Heat."
In one of the film's more rewarding moments, Caan confronts Del Toro in a scene that could easily have been inspired by the brief-but-powerful DeNiro-Pacino confrontation in "Heat."
(This is very much Tarantino territory, as is a really gruesome torture sequence which, happily, doesn't go on quite so long as its obvious inspiration in "Reservoir Dogs"--but McQuarrie doesn't pull it off nearly as well.)
Back in 1992, when Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs introduced the Mexican standoff guys with guns, locked and loaded, at point-blank face-off to viewers who had never seen a John Woo film, it seemed crazy, thrilling, and funky-metaphorical (those guns weren't just weapons they were the characters' wills).
Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe star, as Mr. Longbaugh and Mr. Parker (the "mister" is a reminder of " Reservoir Dogs ").
A threepenny opera of lurid plot turns, oceanic bloodletting, and pseudo-existential dialogue, Way is a late entry in the cycle of Tarantino-influenced crime flicks that came out in the years following Reservoir Dogs .
The Coen brothers added their quirky touch to the film noir thriller "Blood Simple," while Quentin Tarantino went for the buckets-of-blood approach in 1992's "Reservoir Dogs."
In Bruges, in fact, reminded me of nothing less than an earlier excellent example of the post-post-Tarantino film, Christopher McQuarrie's excellent, underrated and under-seen The Way of the Gun .
In this well-executed thriller that’s all spectacle and no substance, the writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (“Jack Reacher”/”The Way of the Gun”), the director in his third time at the helm for the Mission Impossible series, does his usual competent job.
En Misión Imposible: Sentencia Mortal- Parte Uno ( Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning- Part One , 2023), de Christopher McQuarrie, señor que en épocas más felices supo escribir Los Sospechosos de Siempre ( The Usual Suspects , 1995), de Bryan Singer, y debutar como realizador con la asimismo excelente Al Calor de las Armas ( The Way of the Gun , 2000), sucede algo similar a lo que acontecía en ocasión de la reciente Indiana Jones y el Dial del Destino ( Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , 2023), de James Mangold, nos referimos desde ya a una película que responde a una franquicia de larga data y definitivamente seca de ideas, un emporio del cine pasatista para adultos de antaño que demostró suma eficacia y hoy se le ven la madera, los alambres y los fierros oxidados que componen al engendro y supuestamente lo justifican en la gran pantalla, todo con una figura irremplazable en el medio que de hecho ofrece un buen trabajo a título individual y parece cómoda aunque sin la capacidad de maquillar…
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McQuarrie's screenwriting career stretches back to "The Usual Suspects," but his directing career is comparatively young, with only two previous credits to his name: 2000's "The Way of the Gun" and 2012's "Jack Reacher," which, like the "Mission: Impossible" movies, bolstered Tom Cruise's status as a movie star against dwindling odds.
“Rogue Nation” is directed by Christopher McQuarrie, whose directorial pedigree falls way short of his predecessors, with only two previous shaky attempts, “The Way of the Gun” and “Jack Reacher,” under his belt.
And here we have film number five, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects whose directorial efforts The Way of the Gun and Jack Reacher (also with Cruise) are crafted with a flair for rough, no-nonsense action of the Walter Hill school.
In 2000, he directed his first feature, The Way of the Gun, which he also scripted.
Based on the 2005 novel “One Shot,” by British writer Lee Child, it’s intended to expand a popular fiction franchise into film, but the workmanlike direction of Christopher McQuarrie (“The Way of the Gun”), although sporadically entertaining, may doom this flick to one-off status.
Even if you have read them, Christopher McQuarrie's film — the first he's directed and written since 2000's "The Way of the Gun" — moves so fluidly and with such confidence, it'll suck you in from the start.
Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie follows 2000's "The Way of the Gun" with a workmanlike take on "Jack Reacher" that fittingly adapts Child's fragmented sentences and blunt-force drama.
The writer-director is Christopher McQuarrie, an Oscar winner for his Usual Suspects screenplay and the man behind the underrated kidnapping caper The Way of the Gun.
The remainder of the picture, an adaptation of the novel "One Shot" by Lee Childs, written for the screen and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (2000's cult crime item " The Way of the Gun "), is a fairly standard pulpy potboiler of intrigue and double-crosses, albeit one with a high level of competency and a killer 1970s-style car chase.