For the debut feature from the writer of the usual suspects, you'd expect a well plotted multilayered character driven crime flick wouldn't you? Don't be disappointed then. Intelligently scripted and directed, this film may not be stylisied, but it is as effective a
modern crime story as you can get.

While in a completely different league to the black humour of "Chopper", "Way of the Gun" sets a tone of despair from the start.When Longbrough (an impressively morally decadent and vacant Benecio Del Toro) and Parker (Ryan Phillipe), a pair of drifters, are down on their luck in a bizarre and frequently unsettling sequence as sperm donors, (Q:"Why should we use you as a donor?", A:"Because I haven't killed anybody yet") they come across the answer to the dreams: the foolproof kidnapping.

A foolproof kidnapping that leads 2 bodyguards dead, a pregnant surrogate mother on the run, a crime family responsible for money laundering billions, a few icily cold professional bodyguards and some Mafia trained bagmen all ready to kick their asses from here to the grave.

Though everything seems random and everyone total strangers, their hidden agendas are exposed and their secret motives outlined, everything fits together piece by piece. Before long we're transported from the concrete of Los Angeles to the arid Mexican outback in a sequence that owes as much to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (albeit with automatic weaponry and teams of Mafia hitmen) as it does to "Reservoir Dogs".

The stark reality of this film is that while you root for the two drifters whose story we follow, no good deed goes unpunished. There are no moral absolutes. From the opening sequence where our anti- heores get bloodied to the final shootout in Mexico, Benecio Del Toro and Ryan Phillipe are perfectly cast as the vacuous opportunists they really are, while the sympathetic characters get dragged along against their will.

James Caan's turn as a badass mafia bogeyman is also finely cast and well observed, and this is a film where simply, nothing is predictable, except the rattle of small arms fire and a long line of corpses. Chris McQuarrie won an Oscar for the writing of "The Usual Suspects", and this film shows a similar degree of intelligence with subtleties in the dialogue that belie its origins; one major plot point is thrown away in a single line of dialogue, never referred to again, and even then only inferred rather than explicit..  

The characters are chancers, all bluffing their way in life to what they hope isn't a lose-lose scenario, all with their hidden agendas, where the good guys aren't good and the bad guys aren't much better. And with millions at stake in a ransom demand, morality ceases to exist. There are no moral absolutes, a "plan is just a list of things that don't happen" and some people just get away with bloody murder.

Impeccably cast, well scripted and directed, this is a film full of promise. Way of the gun? Way way above average. Keep an eye out of it

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