The directorial debut from The Usual Suspect Oscar-winner screenwriter is wildly derivative and painfully uneven, but The Way of the Gun is still an extremely stylish crime flick that is a lot more entertaining and original than most big Hollywood action films released this summer.  I lost count of how many films Gun reminded me of, but that was probably because the outrageous amount of thunderous gunplay kept distracting me from my tally.

Gun’s opening scene may be the best I’ve seen this year, and it does a great job establishing the film’s two main characters, who we learn go by the phony names Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and Parker (Ryan Phillippe, Cruel Intentions).  Using The Rolling Stones “Rip This Joint” and a cacophony of side-splitting vulgarities, Longbaugh and Parker open a Sam’s Club-size can of whoop ass on a nerdy guy with hair like Columbian soccer star Carlos Valderamma.

Longbaugh and Parker are small-time hoods looking for the big score that would lead to a life of luxury, and, thanks to overhearing a telephone conversation while making a sperm bank deposit, they catch wind of an unusual situation.  It seems there is a wealthy couple that wanted to have a baby, but the wife didn’t want to be inconvenienced with a nine-month pregnancy.  The result is a surrogate mother named Robin (Juliette Lewis, The Other Sister), who is carrying the baby to term and will, theoretically, hand the kid over to the proud parents once it’s born.  Longbaugh and Parker learn that the proxy mother is getting a cool million for being the baby’s temporary host, so they figure the parents will pay much more if both Robin and the unborn child are kidnapped.

The doctor’s office kidnapping scene is a thing of beauty, showing that Longbaugh and Parker definitely know their craft.  The two men are pursued by two of Robin’s hired bodyguards (Taye Diggs, House on Haunted Hill and Nicky Katt, Boiler Room), who could have been a young version of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction.  One of the most inventive car chase scenes follows, and before long, Longbaugh and Parker learn that the baby’s father is a very powerful crime lord named Chidduck (Scott Wilson, Clay Pigeons).

The rest of Gun is packed full of all of the backstabbing, double-crossing and secret identities that you’d expect from the guy that wrote Suspects.  There isn’t a big sucker-punch ending like Suspects, but there are smaller ones that occur more frequently throughout the film.  Some of Gun’s best scenes involve Joe Sarno (James Caan, Mickey Blue Eyes), Chidduck’s cool bagman who reminded me a lot of Harvey Keitel’s “cleaner” in Fiction, or even Barry Newman in The Limey.  In fact, Chidduck lived in a well protected home in the hills, just like Peter Fonda’s character in The Limey.  The big shoot-‘em-up finale looked like it could have been an outtake from Desperado.

Interestingly, there is one scene in Gun where a car radio plays a barely audible news report about somebody named “Singer” involved with underage boys and a shower.  The blurb is an obvious reference to director Bryan Singer and the hot water he landed in while filming several naked young teenagers in Apt Pupil.  Singer also directed the McQuarrie-penned Suspects and, most recently, topped the box office charts with X-Men, a film that McQuarrie was rumored to have had a major hand in writing as well.

1:58 - for strong violence/gore, adult language and sexual content