Karen Gillan answers all our dumb questions about Gunpowder Milkshake
Netflix's newest action star Karen Gillan knows where all the guns are hidden in the Gunpowder Milkshake library
Film Features Gunpowder Milkshake
Note: This story contains spoilers for the movie Gunpowder Milkshake. You have been warned.
If you spent your weekend watching Netflix’s new smash-em-up-and-stab-em Gunpowder Milkshake, then you may have come away from the film with a few questions. How, for instance, did regular people not just wander into that library and find guns? How in the world did Lena Headey’s Scarlet stay hidden for all those years? And why didn’t Sam just go hang out with her cool “aunts” rather than weird Nathan?
After spending a decent amount of time pondering all those issues ourselves, we took our queries to the expert: the movie’s star, Karen Gillan. She took all our silly questions in stride, answering them for the video below. If you’re more of a reading person, there’s a transcript below as well.
The A.V. Club: What’s the deal with that library? Does really no one go there? Is it always locked?
Karen Gillan: I feel like people must just go there for weapons. That’s probably why it’s locked. Maybe there are all these code words and stuff like that. That’s what I have in my head.
AVC: But there are displays for children…
KG: I know! Maybe the assassins are bringing their kids while they get the weapons that they need for later.
AVC: Speaking of your children of assassins, in this movie, your mom sort of moved away when you were 12. How do you think Sam was trained? Did she do it out of her own volition or was it a Stockholm Syndrome thing?
KG: I think there was an element of Stockholm Syndrome slightly. She was abandoned by her mother when she was 12, and so that was the biggest trauma of her life. So, as a coping mechanism and maybe to feel closer to her mother, I think she probably entered into the world, but she was already in the world because Nathan, who works at the firm, looked after her and raised her for years. And so she was already in the world. I think she probably just wanted to be like her mother because she probably was angry at her, but also had a little bit of hero worship toward her because she was absent.
AVC: Do you think Sam should see a therapist?
KG: Yes. I think everybody should see a therapist first, but especially Sam. She’s dealt with a lot of abandonment issues, and she’s killed a lot of people. That’s going to take its toll. I mean, maybe they could get like a group therapist. They could all use the same one.
Gunpowder Milkshake is streaming now on Netflix. You can find our review of the movie, which graded a B, here.
33 Comments
The movie was really good.There was that one bit where the librarian said that it’s nice to have kids in the library again, so maybe that answers the “do kids come” question. In my head the library was originally just a regular library, but then they had to diversify due to diminished membership revenue and the transition from physical books to ebooks. But the librarians kept everything just as it was, hoping for the day when things might go back to normal and people might want to rent physical books again.
The movie was really good.Really? I thought it fell kind of flat.
It’s too bad, too. It really should’ve been an absolute home run. The cast is loaded, the idea is solid, the fight choreography is stellar, but it just seemed like there were two or three competing movies going on so it never really found the right tone.
It tries to be sentimental, and also nasty fun, and also kind of slapstick, but also a self-serious action movie that MEANS THINGS, and when mashed together it just comes across as kind of blah.
The pacing is all off, the slo-mo was just beaten to death the score was way too melodramatic, (seriously, it’s like they lifted the music from a Nolan film) and as good as the fight scenes were, they weren’t filmed or edited to highlight the creativity and (in many cases) silliness of what was going on. It’s the same with many of the acting choices (which I blame on the director because I can’t say anything bad about any of the cast) where the lines that should be deadpan are emotionally loaded and things that should come across as light and quippy are leaden.
It’s also like a big chunk of things were left out that were kind of important, since none of the bad guys have even a whisper of a personality (unless you count “looking especially skeevy” as personality). There should’ve been some kind of sense of who “The Firm” is (aside from a bunch of interchangable old white dudes plus Paul Giamatti) just so the audience can join in on hating them.
Can we just get an immediate remake with the exact same cast but with a director who knows how to make these kinds of movies?
But it’s not supposed to be that sort of movie with actual characters or plot.It’s a shoot-em-up. In the vein of John Wick, or Paul Giamatti’s other movie, literally called Shoot Em Up.And The Firm aren’t the villains. Jim McAllister and his goons are. Like Giamatti said, for The Firm, it’s just business. That was a weak point, when they sorta implied that the dudes running The Firm were some sort of patriarchal boys club; without really following through. But it’s not central to the story at all, so i kinda just ignored it.Nor are you really even supposed to hate Jim and his goons. They’re “bad guys” sure, but ultimately Sam killed his son, so him wanting revenge makes sense. We root for Sam not out of moral obligation, but just because she’s the pov character.I’ll agree that were some flaws. Generally, I think where the movie failed is in the few moments where it tried to make itself deliver some sort of moral or social lesson. This just isn’t the right movie for that. But that was infrequent enough that it didn’t detract too much overall. I kinda got the feeling that maybe it was the studio coming in and going “wait, you got a movie with an all female cast? You gotta lean on that more.” So they tacked on a few bits of dialogue just to remind everyone.
But it’s not supposed to be that sort of movie with actual characters or plot.Fine, then it has to be a whole hell of a lot more fun. And it just . . . wasn’t. Half the time it felt like it had a Zack Snyder problem of taking something silly and fun and then taking itself way too seriously to be either of those things.
Take Paul Giamatti. He was utterly wasted in this. He delivered his lines like he hadn’t read the script. Then contrast that to the absolute blast he had chewing every ounce of scenery in Shoot ‘Em Up. Or Angela Bassett, who’s an amazing actress, but here she had one gear, “scowly anger”.
Geez, at least get somebody who could give a good over-the-top “I’m going to torture you and make the girl watch” speech. Ralph Ineson played it like he had a bus to catch.
I wanted it to be the type of movie you’re talking about, I really did. And there are a few moments where it gets there, but they’re few and far between. Then “paralyzed limbs” fight was great, but the score and framing were all wrong, the thing where Michelle Yeoh hooks a guy from a balcony and then jumps down, pulling him up as she falls, should’ve been awesome, but it was spoiled in the editing and had the effect of explaining the punchline to a joke before you finish the joke. Trying to milk a ton of pathos from Carla Gugino fell flat because there’d been nothing to distinguish her aside from being played by Carla Gugino. The ending slo-mo fight was super cool, but they started the slo-mo too early so it felt too long and made me think of student filmmakers too in love with their own work to make necessary edits to maintain the right pace. And everywhere else it was played too serious and too slow to approach that level of fun that it needed to hang together.
Like, just before the big fight, “There’s no more standing on the sidelines. We all need to pick a side.” What sidelines? What sides? What the hell is she talking about? It sounds good and like the kind of line that would be in this type of movie, but it doesn’t make any fucking sense because there haven’t been any “sides” established. I mean, something about “that’s my daughter you’re talking to” or something could’ve had that “fuck yeah!!!” moment the movie needed, but instead it was that kind of “end of a prestige Western, this is all very important stuff” choral music.
I spent the entire movie wondering what was going on with her face. I thought it was bad plastic surgery.
none of the bad guys have even a whisper of a personality (unless you count “looking especially skeevy” as personality).
Why not? It’s worked for Gary Oldman for the last thirty-odd years!
He totally has personality in all his roles.
Agreed. It really felt to me like the script needed another pass to iron out some of the concepts and connective tissues, alongside some dialogue punching up.
Like there’s so much in the movie that should make it work (the cast, the concept, the fights) but the script just felt like it was at that draft stage where they hadn’t quite settled on what the movie was going to be.
I did not find the movie to be really good. I thought is was really bad frankly. It seemed to have no clue what it was going for. Tonally, it was all over the place. The plot is utterly absurd, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but even in absurdity there has to be at least one character you care about who gives you an emotional thread to hold on to. It was just a scattershot mess of every assassin with a heart movie made before it but with no rules, no stakes, and no character motivations you could care about. It was a bizarre mashup of influences from The Professional, John Wick, Shoot Em Up, Atomic Blonde, etc. but never found any footing. I just found it to be a grab bag of well worn hitman movie tropes with absolutely no logical or emotional cohesion.
I don’t think it was terrible, it was just frustrating. It felt to me like it was almost a good to great movie, but two or three bad decisions kept sinking what should’ve been amazing. It was like everything in it, from the cinematography to the music choices to the dialogue almost worked, but something in every scene would screw it up so it never came together.
Obviously terrible is subjective, but I was simply not entertained. Even the dumbest action movies can find a sense of energy, style and intention that propel you along so you’re not dwelling on how ludicrous it is. A big part of that is how well it’s shot and edited and this movie consistently had portions of action that were edited badly, with no sense of the space the action is taking place in. In this case I can’t blame the editor because it seems like the director didn’t know how to shoot the proper coverage for an action scene. There were quite a few times where I said to myself, why is the camera there? And why the fuck did it just cut to another camera mis-framed static position? Oh, then it just cut back, and all of this disorienting but clearly not in an intentional way. These aren’t things you should be thinking about while watching a movie. Then you have the ridiculously loooong slow mo scene in the diner, all from one angle, and obviously stitched together with CGI. What could’ve been a cool sequence was sabotaged by some baffling directorial choices. On the other side of the coin, give me something to emotionally invest in and I could forgive all of the above. Despite having a stacked cast of fantastic actors I couldn’t find anything to latch on to. The most compelling scene in the movie for me was the sequence that led to Gugino’s death. For a few moments, I gave a crap about what was happening because Gugino, despite the viewer having no clue about her history, the library’s history, the firm’s history, was fantastic and portrayed, just through her acting, that there was some actual history and motivation behind the character. I became more interested in her story, with her few minutes of screen time, than what was happening in the movie. And I don’t blame the other actors for not being able to pull off the same emotional heft. They’re all more than capable of it, but they’re given basically nothing to work with and sometimes it seemed like they were in completely different movies. Which isn’t their fault. That’s the director’s fault.
“Really good?” Basically repeating and recycling every action movie trope of the past 10-15 years? You’ve got some incredibly low standards.
I love her unique combination of goofiness, sexiness, and menace
I watched it this weekend. Very violent. I never realized that Karen Gillan was so tall. She’s come a long ways from her Doctor Who days. The movie has one heck of a supporting cast. Bloody, entertaining, shoot-em-up fun.
She needs a better director cause I found her too bland to lead the film.
Am I the only one who wants to see her character in the John Wick world? Maybe they go toe to toe and then team up
My feeling on the whole movie was that this is what the John Wick world would look like if women were in charge of the aesthetics.John Wick’s world is what happens when you let male Brooklyn Barista’s DM your TSR “Top Secret” game.
You get a star just for mentioning Top Secret, the game that taught me what a Walther PPK is.
“male Brooklyn Barista’s DM your TSR “Top Secret” game.” I don’t understand what this is
Gunpowder Milkshake is terrible. The cast looks – and I am not basing this on anything sexual – wrong. I watched the film a second time and I can’t decide if it is the camera angles, makeup, wardrobe, everybody had food poisoning like on the set of The African Queen, or a hellish combination of all the above, but there are no moments where the cast looks right. I can’t pin my finger on it, it’s like the bad lighting date from Sinefeld.Then there are the slow-motion moments where cast members look at each other with these bovine expressions straight out of laxative and psychotropic drug commercials.The library full of hidden weapons was a cool idea until the characters decided to waste time fighting hand to hand. It has some good moments, but the plot just stalls to a point where I started imagining Jamie Lee spooning Activia into the camera to get this bolus moving.This could have been a lot of fun. Instead, it’s just this weirdly derivative mess with poetic readings over backyard burials, soap-opera-level-stoopid writing, slo-mo so pointless even Zack Snyder is confused, and immensely unlikable characters. I was rooting for the bad guys at the end.
Like a lot of people, I thought the movie was style over substance, but hey I watched it and it had a few moments for which you could mostly credit the actresses.That said, the dumb question I wished you had asked is how the math works for Lena Headey to be Karen Gillan’s mother because having that up front took me out of the film and though I had to accept it, I really couldn’t get past the thought. Maybe if they had used makeup to age Headey, but as far as I could tell the did not.
It’s the same math used for Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.
I mean, Headey is 14 years older than Gillan, so it’s not completely implausible.
Yeah, but Ms. Headey would have turned fourteen in October and Ms. Gillan was born in November, so it becomes even more wonky math.(As soon as they said it, I had to look it up.)
She went to the Mrs. Freeling School Of Hardknock life! LOL How old would JoBeth Williams supposed to be when she had their eldest? like 13?
Eleven. Williams was born in December 48, Dominique Dunne in November 59. On that basis, Craig T. Nelson is by far the biggest monster in Poltergeist.
The actors are 14 years apart in age.
A lot of mothers and daughters look almost the same age. Some people have good genes. You can use their real life ages all the time to compare.
This should have been a blast, with a great cast, but…just wasn’t.
I started the movie right away after seeing the trailer on Netflix, but it was not a good movie. I love Karen Gillan, but her character is completely flat. She was monotone, spoke gruffly and sounded like she was trying to do a John Wick impression. The plot is preposterous, and the film completely fails at establishing a weird universe like the first John Wick film did, as none of it makes sense. It revolves around a sanctuary (a 50’s diner), a library (the arsenal) and an elite white man only “Firm” that coordinates assassinations for profit. Only none of these things are important to the film. The library is not where KG’s character grew up, the rules around the diner are never really stated and are broken without consequence, and the Firm barely matters aside from scheduling the assassination of some guy, and then KG’s character when it inevitably fails. If they’d made the library important, where KG grew up after her mother leaves and then delve into the world’s rules like John Wick did, or at least provide relatable characters, then it might have been ok. However, they wasted the talent they had and it was not a good film.
> If you’re more of a reading person, there’s a transcript below as well.Bless you.
Great visuals and an even greater cast wasted on a lame script. I started nodding off halfway through.
Not to be confused with Milkpowder Gunshake, about a food technologist working in the dairy industry whose gets nervous when he handles firearms.