Gunpowder Milkshake is a Netflix film with mainly female leads and it has been poorly reviewed. Those two facts aren’t linked, but after the failure of Elektra tanked female-led superhero movies for a decade, there are probably some people out there who would like to connect Gunpowder’s poor critical and commercial reception to its cast. It might be foolish of me then to try and suggest that Gunpowder Milkshake has something to teach gaming about female leads, but baby I’m a fool, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
One of my favourite authors is Elmore Leonard, and I’ve never bought an Elmore Leonard book. Those two facts are linked. Every Leonard novel I’ve ever read has been found abandoned in a hotel lobby, or at an airport, or falling apart at the back of a ‘take a book, leave a book’ shelf. This is the only way to read Leonard. He elevates pulp fiction to new levels of cool and realism, with knuckle-popping dialogue, tense scene-setting, and ferocious action. He’s Quentin Tarantino without the foot fetish.
Related: Sweet Tooth Gives Me The Apocalypse I Wanted From The Last Of UsYou can get all this from reading a new Leonard, but to really feel the magic, the spine needs to have been cracked by someone else until the cover is peeling off, the pages dogeared and stained with coffee, fluttering open from the sea air and being crumpled into different backpacks in a hurry. It needs to have been used and loved. I don’t see the appeal of listening to music on vinyl, but I understand the smell of an old book.
Gunpowder Milkshake reminded me of reading Elmore Leonard – even more than most adaptations of Leonard’s own works do – and it had that same coffee-stained, torn-up charm. It wasn't a perfect movie by any stretch, the pacing was off and the film was more concerned with cool lines and stellar action sequences than story, but it made up for it with brilliant characters. It won't win any awards, but there aren't many films I'll see this year I'll end up enjoying more – and its characters are the ones who have a lesson for gaming.
Karen Gillan is our protagonist, an assassin who spends the film trying to protect a young girl. During the runtime she teams up with her estranged mother – also an assassin – and the three Librarians, who are really undercover assassins and arms dealers. All women. The enemies Gillan's character has to fight are all male, whether they be the men she kills as part of a standard mission as the film begins, the goons who come after her when she goes rogue, the doctor who tries to poison her, the mysterious Firm, or the father of one of those men she kills right at the start, who happens to have a whole gang of men at his disposal. It's never presented as simply as 'men vs women', nor does it lean particularly hard into gender equalities or any ham-fisted metaphors. It isn't making a statement about gender, and as such, the split feels natural. Our lead is a woman, okay, with you so far. The child she protects is a girl, yeah sure. The mother comes back into the picture, yep, saw that one coming since she's in the very first scene. Now the Librarians are involved, and I'm on board with that too. As for the villains being men, well, violent gangsters are typically male, so that all checks out too.
Few games – especially action games that lean into gaming's more violent tendencies – are female-led like this. When you think of female-led games, you might think of Tomb Raider or Horizon as the obvious examples, with Lara and Aloy both sharing the determination and deadliness of Gillan's character. Both games feature other female characters too, but they don't put additional female characters at the forefront in the way Gunpower Milkshake does. This is the lesson gaming can take from the film; while great strides have been made in terms of female protagonists – helped by a rise in more robust character creators – we still haven't had a game as fiercely female as Gunpowder Milkshake. I don't want it to be adapted into a game, because a) a mildly unsuccessful movie is clearly not going to get a video game, and b) its issues around story and pacing would only be amplified, but it still serves to offer something of a blueprint for gaming.
I wrote a while ago that I wanted to see more games influenced by Birds of Prey; more games embracing the colourful carnage and alt-z soundtrack of Harley Quinn's solo outing and giving us a twist on the typical dark and grisly gore often associated with more violent titles. A game that takes cues from Gunpowder Milkshake would be just the ticket, and while the film isn't destined to have much of a legacy, I'd love to see games pick up the mantle.