Opens September 1, 2000

Add 2,000 rounds to the amount of ammo Sam Peckinpah unleashed in his career, and you've got the bullet count of The Way of the Gun, a too-clever-by-zero concoction from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects). Memorable only for its geometrically intricate plotting, despicable characters, and too-the-hilt violence, Guns's central characters are so grubby you might think the Sundance Film Festival has just opened.

Guns blazes away on a bullet-loaded plotline so diabolically crafted and so cunningly tripped that, of course, one simply gets sidetracked in the melees of confusion and uncanny happenstances. Befitting those creations which are cerebrally showy, one doesn't give a rat's, shall we say, ear about what happens to the main characters, in this case, two grubs, one of whom looks like James Dean with caterpillar eye brows.

In this Byzantine slummer, a t-shirted pair of low-lifes, Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro) , stumble bum their way into a kidnapping. They happen upon a circumstance, where a young, down-and-out appearing woman, Robin (Juliette Lewis) is carrying the child of a wealthy businessman and his trophy wife. They decide to pluck the surrogate mother and hold her, and more valuably, the upcoming kid up for ransom. Not the best laid plans to begin with, they soon find out whom they're dealing with: The "businessman" handles "situations" in Las Vegas, the kind of dirty work that no one wants to handle, with the kind of clients you don't mess with unless you have aspirations of winding up in an unmarked plot near Sonny Liston's way out near the airport.

In essence, McQuarrie has mined the Keyser Soze field again. Like he did so menacingly in The Usual Suspects, McQuarrie stokes things with imagined fear in the form of a gangster and a thug world so sadistic and horrible that the viewer is mesmerized by what could happen. Once again, McQuarrie shows his dexterity in milking that ominous, satanic Soze-ish shadow that looms, infusing the minimalist storyline with its most chilling appendage.

Unfortunately, what-could-happen far outdistances what-does-happen, which is mainly a bunch of nasty encounters, brutal shootouts, and horrific torturings, as well as all the queasy stuff that can happen to a woman in the very last stages of a difficult pregnancy. Even Bunuel in his most butcher-shop excesses would have trouble topping Way of the Gun in terms of its visual images of savagery and malice.

Seared with the sort of dead-fly visuals one usually finds in indie movies and smelted with some high-and-dry philosophical notions on the imminence of the cheap and horrible death awaiting its protagonists (and we use the term "protagonist" very liberally), The Way of the Gun wings some Tarantino-ish targets. There's no getting around it: As a screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie packs a script with a full-explosive kit of twists, detonating them with smartly-tripped crises, and then incinerating them with nihilistic detachment. Unfortunately, after a while, one simply loses interest in the movie itself and marvels at the story wiring, as one might admire an imaginative chess match. In short, you couldn't care less about it because the two lead characters that McQuarrie has constructed his plot around are such one-dimensional scum: Ornate plotting and gory killing - it gets old. More interesting are McQuarrie's secondary characters, most prominently James Caan as a weary mobster who dispenses "adjudication." He's, basically, the "Keyser Soze" in this one, and he's thoroughly entrancing and menacing whenever he's on screen.

While McQuarrie is extremely gifted in constructing his story equations, his scores on the non-verbal portion of the movie are surprisingly humdrum. Shot mostly in standard-issue, straight-on medium shots, with little flare in shot compositions, and only the most rudimentary set-ups in character movement, The Way of the Gun is cinematically inarticulate. Again, to harken back to The Usual Suspects,McQuarrie, as a filmmaker, is kin to one of those characters, "Verbal" - he can run off at the mouth. Should he learn visual punctuation and grammar, it's likely that Christopher McQuarrie may someday make a terrific film that shoots more than hollow-point blanks.