Gunpowder Milkshake arrives curdled.
Gunpowder Milkshake rolls up with the promising swagger of a neon-drenched, female-fronted action epic and proceeds to almost immediately trip over its own metaphorical high heels. It’s a film that wants to be cool – violently, painfully wants to – but ends up like a teenager trying to land a backflip after watching one too many TikToks.
Directed by Navot Papushado – formerly one half of the Israeli duo behind the grim, razor-sharp Big Bad Wolves – this solo effort trades tension and grit for slow-motion gun-fu and pastel carnage. It feels less like an evolution of his earlier work and more like a sugar-high fever dream after bingeing Drive, Sin City, and a stack of Lisa Frank stationery. The result? A film that’s all aesthetic, no atmosphere.
The premise is one of those “sounds fun until it actually starts happening” situations. Karen Gillan plays Sam, a stoic assassin working for a shadowy crime syndicate called The Firm, because nothing says “serious criminal enterprise” like being named after a John Grisham novel or the band that released novelty song “Star Trekkin’”. She’s been abandoned by her mother, also an assassin (Lena Headey, drifting through with a general air of contractual obligation), but when a hit goes sideways and there’s a precocious child in danger, it’s time for a mother-daughter reunion plus backup in the form of a covert library of heavily armed women.
And here’s the thing – it looks great. The production design leans hard into the comic-book aesthetic, bathed in oversaturated neon and carefully curated chaos. The action is stylized, choreographed like it’s trying to win Best Fight Scene at the MTV Movie Awards and at least one of those sequences is genuinely inventive, if you lower your standards just a smidge.
But beneath all the visual bravado, it’s hollow. The emotional beats are wafer-thin, the dialogue sounds like it was written by a committee of cool-hungry interns, and the big feminist energy is mostly surface-deep, served with a wink but no weight.
The cast – Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett, Carla Gugino, Paul Giamatti – reads like the guest list for a much better film. They’re all capable of greatness, but here they’re reduced to wearing trench coats, delivering limp exposition, and posing like action figures in a collector’s cabinet no one dusts.
Gunpowder Milkshake could’ve been Kill Bill meets Atomic Blonde with a splash of John Wick, but it settles for “Generic Action Movie Pinterest Board”. There’s a sharper, smarter movie lurking somewhere in the script’s bones, but in the end, it’s all vibe, no vision. If you’re looking for something loud, pretty, and emotionally weightless to fill 114 minutes, it’ll do. Just don’t expect it to stick with you any longer than the sugar rush from a real milkshake.
