Grade: D

Verdict: Shoots bloody blanks.

Details: Starring Ryan Phillippe, Benicio Del Toro, Juliette Lewis. Rated R for strong violence/gore, language and some sexuality. Two hours.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Intrepid souls who make it all the way to the end of "The Way of the Gun" will be rewarded by a bloody Caesarean scene that's a culmination of all the gratuitous gore and nastiness that's come before.

You get your first whiff of the movie's tough-posturing fakery in its first scene, when you glimpse baby-faced Ryan Phillippe, drudged-out with a grungy beard, trying to play tough guy in a parking lot. He most resembles 'N Sync's Justin Timberlake on a bender. It gets a lot worse from there.

An Oscar winner for his "Usual Suspects" screenplay, Christopher McQuarrie makes a sluggishly paced directing debut in the tale of a couple of lowlifes named Parker (Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro). In Parker's voiceover narration, he explains that he and his buddy turned their back on the 9-to-5 world and "stepped off the path."

Actually, they seem to have found a new path, leading them into the overplayed world of Quentin Tarantino, where guns shoot constantly, and characters mouths shoot off even more. (At least Tarantino's thugs are often witty whereas McQuarrie's guys mainly spout homophobic rants for the first 10 minutes, apparently defending their masculinity.)

McQuarrie also borrows from "The Wild Bunch," capping his movie with a drawn-out shootout scene in a Mexican border that seems to go on for about seven hours, in real time.

The plot kicks in when Parker and Longbaugh accidentally overhear about a surrogate mother named Robin (Juliette Lewis), who's bearing the child of a rich man and his trophy wife - not because they're infertile, but because the trophy wife doesn't want to imperil her trophy figure.

They kidnap Robin which leads to what may be the movie's best scene - a tense, slow-motion chase through alleys as the criminal duo are pursued by Robin's bodyguards (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt).

As you might expect in a movie like this, the rich expectant father turns out to be a well-connected wiseguy, who sends his bodyguards and a bag man (James Caan) to "negotiate" with the kidnappers (in other words, kill them).

Though it's not exactly original - which is a surprise from McQuarrie, who turned underworld clichés on their head in "Suspects" - the movie is so intent on an air of existential grunge, it becomes suffocating and pretentious. Even if the script had given Parker and Longbaugh any likable traits, Phillippe is too lightweight, Del Toro too blurry and mumble-mouthed to make us care. Lewis survives intact, but the only real magnetism comes from Diggs, in a limited role. Every time he disappears from the screen, you count the minutes until he returns.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service