The Way of the Gun

With an Oscar under his belt for the screenplay of The Usual Suspects, McQuarrie makes his directorial bow with this arresting attempt at a contemporary thriller filtered through the spirit of Peckinpah. Hoods Del Toro and Phillippe like to think they're the last word in ruthless cool, but they may have to reconsider when they kidnap pregnant Lewis and discover her unlikely connection to a scary crime figure, who soon has veteran fixer Caan on the case. With its elliptical gunfights, deliberate echoes of The Wild Bunch and probing moral sense, the film shows that, post-Tarantino, there's life left in the genre yet, even if the much signposted childbirth finale goes seriously off the rails, and Phillippe's badass credentials never really persuade.