Wrong Way

The Way of the Gun registers less as a film than as an exercise, a rehearsal of nigh-toothless neo-noir scenarios more notable now for their durability than for any recent infusion of vigor. This jarringly paced disappointment-the feature directorial debut of Oscar-winning Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie-is the latest in the increasingly ineffectual succession of Tarantino wanna-bes. It's overheated, undercooked and consistently inconsistent.

Suspects, which singlehandedly revived the moribund twist-of-the-knife credo, was a sublimely absurd concoction, jammed with incident and propelled by a plot that snuffed logic in its coils. Beneath the film's simmering cool rested a stylistic reserve and maturity that grounded Keyser Soze-the most tantalizingly enigmatic bogeyman since Harry Lime in The Third Man-in an ordered, if intricate, universe. Had The Way of the Gun, similarly flush with faux-hard-boiled dialogue and byzantine dramatic alleys, followed the tongue-in-cheek example of Suspects, it might have amounted to something beyond disposable posturing. Sadly, it seeks instead to cultivate the rococo nihilism of Pulp Fiction and, like a gangly child testing a skateboard, instantly keels over.

The plot is so deliberately serrated and latticed, it's as though McQuarrie presented himself with a spate of seemingly mutually exclusive stories and set out to contrive bonds. As the film begins, Parker (a muted Ryan Phillippe, far too pretty to be slumming as a con) teams with Longbaugh (Suspect's Benicio del Toro) to kidnap Robin (Juliette Lewis), a surrogate-mother-to-be pregnant at the behest of a shady L.A. shark and his barren wife. Absconding to Mexico, the three must contend with triple-crosses, shifting loyalties and a raft of unsavory assailants, among them James Caan as a benign assassin-cum-philosopher.

The creaking mechanics of this oh-so-gritty, oh-so-calculated situation aren't the problem; other, better, recent movies-like Bound or The Last Seduction-have used prefab noir constructs as a springboard for stylistic virtuosity. Distressingly, The Way of the Gun fumbles its tone-the same tone of stony lunacy McQuarrie so masterfully insinuated in Suspects. It's an adolescent, ersatz Pulp Fiction, tepidly riffing on that film's spry guerrilla warfare and tangy exchanges; even its title sounds like an uncertain stab at cooler-than-thou suavity. Tarantino walked a fine line between dispassioned moxie and savage vitality; in his footsteps, McQuarrie falters promptly.

The actors only hinder matters. Phillippe, milky-voiced and cloudy-eyed, isn't persuasive as a scruffy lowlife, while the actively agitating del Toro remains a fractious screen presence. And the presence of Lewis, who has appeared in more than her share of stylish thrillers (Cape Fear, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk Till Dawn), further demonstrates the film's trite determination to be taken seriously.

McQuarrie tries to forcibly impose a cool on this movie that The Usual Suspects radiated without effort, as well as the sinister exuberance emitted so famously by Pulp Fiction. A project this unsure and unschooled should come with training wheels-The Way of the Gun certainly needs them.