The Way of the Gun

After winning an Oscar for writing The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie directed for the first time and did the opposite of what was expected: instead of another clever puzzle, he made a dirty, slow modern western. He handed the gunfight choreography to his own brother, a Navy SEAL. The result is action in which you can read each character's training off their movement, who takes cover, who steps back to reload, who has no idea what they are doing. The plot: two drifting criminals, Parker and Longbaugh, impulsively kidnap a surrogate mother carrying a wealthy businessman's child. Ryan Phillippe, Benicio del Toro, Juliette Lewis and James Caan star. It was made for $8.5m. Released on 8 September 2000, it opened to $2.15m and finished at $13.2m worldwide. It failed commercially and survived as a cult item. Who it is for: people who like crime films where the talk is sparse and the gunplay is credible. Who it is not for: anyone needing someone to root for. Everybody here is repellent to some degree and the film makes no effort to fix that.