The Way of the Gun

Greetings intrepid adventurers!

There's a short list of movies that every guy should see. The Way of the Gun is high on that list. I don't know when it was made. It's older. I don't know who directed it. I DO know that it kicks faces with finality and aplomb and doesn't apologize for one spine shattering moment of it's excellence. Who's in it? I'll tell you who's in it. Taye Diggs. Ryan Phillipe. Benicio Del Toro. James Caan. These four guys could film themselves sitting at a coffee table in a high priced yuppy coffee shop wearing scarves and drinking drinks with piles of whipped cream on top and it would still be one of the manliest things ever caught on tape. I'm not kidding.

 So, the movie. This is one you have to pay attention to, so tell your girl to turn off her phone and be quiet for the next two hours. She can do it. I have faith in her. You sat through that one movie that looked cute, she can sit through this. The story is twisting, convoluted, intricate, and several other adjectives that mean that same thing. It's like the writer thought to himself; "Self, how can we tell a story that invloves two bad guys doing bad things for selfish reasons, but still make them the main characters that people are gonna root for?" His self answered, and he wrote this movie. Adding the kidnapping of a pregnant lady, a car chase in first gear, shoplifting, dirty money, darn near poetic dialogue, twenty pounds of broken glass and untrustworthy everybody trying to play everybody.

In fact, you should watch this movie twice, because you'll get even more out of it the second time. It's like if you trained to be a swordfighter for fifteen years and loved it; learning the intricacies of the movements and the defenses and the names and the strategies and honing your reflexes to razor sharp perfection and making yourself into the last modern buckanneer; and then one night some guy tried to stab you in an alley with his swiss army knife. Oh boy, you bet you'd pull that three and a half feet of cold hard steel from your scabbard under your trench coat and swing it around with such skill and dexterity that the assassin that was waiting on the roof of the building would jump down and flourish his OWN sword with equal skill and challenge you to a duel to the death. You'd laugh and accept his challenge, and then you'd fight and it would be epic and brutal and bloody but you'd win, stabbing him through the heart with a final "Hiyaah!!!" The assassin would fall to the pavement and die and only then you'd discover it was really your sister and she'd been training the last fifteen years to be a shadow assassin and you'd be heart broken. But then you'd recognize the poignancy of the moment, and you'd stand and hold your sword high so the yellow street lights reflect off it, and then you'd look at the guy crouched against the wall who tried to stab you and you'd wipe off your blade on his shirt and he'd crap his pants in fear and run away screaming like a girl. THAT would be the satisfaction you'd get from watching The Way of the Gun a second time. Booyah.