Film - Jonathan Romney finds deeper meaning in a deliberately tasteless, misogynistic thriller

Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun is a mean, nasty, brutal film, but it is in no way a dumb one. It has the skewed critical intelligence that you would expect from the writer of that quintessentially clever-dick piece of neo-noir The Usual Suspects. Like that film, The Way of the Gun is a tale of skulduggery among men, but this time the misogyny is foregrounded to become a theme in its own right. In The Usual Suspects, the single female character was first sidelined, then given a nasty send-off. The Way of the Gun begins with one of its anti-heroes casually punching a woman in the face, and it ends with a shoot-out in a Mexican brothel - while a gory caesarian delivery is being performed.

On paper, this might seem about as unpleasant as American gangster cinema can get - and that's pretty much how it comes across on screen, too. But McQuarrie should not be written off too quickly as a callous opportunist riding the tail-end of the post-Tarantino sick-kicks wave. He has more serious intentions than just to amuse us, and the real comparisons here are with the Seventies American directors of westerns and thrillers - Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Walter Hill - who gave full moral weight to the power of a firearm and what it means to shoot one.

We can see that McQuarrie is questioning the men-with-guns myth right at the start, when his two hoodlums (played by the weird, hoarse Benicio Del Toro and the tarnished pretty-face Ryan Phillippe) introduce themselves as "Par-ker" and "Longbaugh"- the real names of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Like them, they will go down outnumbered under the Mexican sun, but will have been stripped of any vestige of heroism.

Parker and Longbaugh are losers who fancy themselves as existential heroes facing their fate: choosing between "petty crime or a minimum wage". They believe in "the way things are meant to be", but it is clear from the start that the world is a chaos in which people can only pretend to be in control. They hear of a young woman, Robin (Juliette Lewis), who has been impregnated as a surrogate mother for a wealthy client, and decide to kidnap her for the ransom. But the client is a powerful mob figure, Chidduck (Scott Wilson). Once Robin is in their hands, Chidduck won't pay up, but unleashes a merciless veteran, played by James Caan, to track them down. The duo's plan comes undone in a labyrinthine imbroglio of double-dealing, in which everyone - including Robin's doctor - has their own agenda.

This is a classic example of a film in which no character is straightforwardly sympathetic. We may root for Robin but, as the film goes on, it is less as the young mother in peril, more as a tough operator who proves as remorseless and feral as her captors. By conventional standards, the idea of having a pregnant woman as the stakes in men's murderous games is simply tasteless, and McQuarrie knows it. He wants us to be shocked that real blood gets spilled, not just Tarantino's ketchup. The film's climax is at moments barely watchable, largely because of the discrepancy between the abstract action of the gunplay and the intensity of Robin's screams in labour: what is shocking is the discordant element of birth, normally an absolute taboo in this genre. Rather than letting us relish the action, the film detaches us from it and questions why we expected to enjoy it.

That may seem an oversophisticated, perhaps even over-familiar, excuse for what is surely just a tough, brutal little crime movie. The Way of the Gun is just that - but as such films go, it is a pretty distinctive example. Its genre attractions are several: McQuarrie has devised some action sequences that are as effective as anything in Michael Mann's Heat - in particular, a slow game of tag between cars. But it also has a moral weight, a sense of the immediacy of death (its oldest gangster, played by Geoffrey Lewis, is a suicidal depressive) and a quite unique mood of careworn remorse. Its moral centre is Sarno, an old-guard foot-soldier who bears his battle scars on his neck - a wonderfully stiff turn in barrel-chested menace from Caan, who makes the film's most dangerous character also the most sympathetic. It's not just that he gets McQuarrie's most baroquely resonant dialogue ("I can promise you a day of reckoning that you will not remember long enough to never forget"). Nor is it sentimental, Kray-style nostalgia that makes us respect a hard man simply because he is older. It is more that Sarno is the professional who knows how things should work, and sees, with a pained wince, how they are going wrong.

Del Toro's Longbaugh remarks that villains aren't what they were: "These days, they want to be criminal more than they want to commit crime." Caan replies: "That's not just crime, that's the way of the world." But it is also, McQuarrie argues, the way of cinema: too many movies about guys dressed for the part, too much bonhomie and circus-style gunplay. In contrast, McQuarrie gives us birth, death, blood and maximum-impact retribution. The Way of the Gun is a thriller that horrifies as much as it thrills - and that, McQuarrie seems to be saying, should be the way of the world.

The Way of the Gun (18) opens on 17 November at Warner West End, UGC Haymarket and Fulham Road and Ritzy

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