Damsel (2024)

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is traded in to a far and apparently very prosperous country to marry the local prince in trade for the food and riches that will help her famine-plagued home country survive. Independent and a bit wilful, Elodie isn’t terribly happy about this, her starving subjects only being a thought the script mentions when it remembers them. At least the prince (Nick Robinson) she’s bound to marry seems pleasant enough, while her future stepmother (Robin Wright) is rather on the horrid side, and never acts like you’d act towards a girl you’ll spend a considerable amount of time with in the future.

That’s because this is meant to be a very short marriage, for Elodie is not really meant as a long-term daughter-in-law but as a sacrifice to a dragon. So soon, our heroine finds herself thrown into an abyss by her betrothed and hunted through its murder cave by a sadistic dragon who probably shouldn’t have read all those Thomas Harris novels.

On one hand, I’m all in for a film in which a princess supposed to be sacrificed to a particularly unpleasant kind of political convenience strikes back and wins her independence, and I think parts of the fantasy survivalist middle part of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s movie are rather effective.

On the other hand, I find Damsel’s moral stance when it comes to its dragon main villain either completely unexamined or actively repugnant. Apparently, committing serial killings while gloating sadistically over hunting down young women for centuries, during that course shifting an already shitty culture into an even more shitty form is a-okay and totally excused when said culture – whose living members are generations divorced from the inciting incident – once murdered one’s babies. One wrong apparently makes serial killing innocents perfectly alright, forever. Let’s not even talk about the implied suggestion that, if the victims of the dragon were only really of the bloodline of the royal family of Evilstan, and not just poor nobles married into it to die, murdering them would be any better.

Damsel even plays it as a happy ending when our heroine – after teaming up with the dragon to slaughter the royal family in an act of vengeance that at least hits the actual perpetrators of an evil deed - finishes the dubious tale by taking said serial killing dragoness with her to her homeland, a place that also already suffers from a famine having to feed the fucking monster will probably not help alleviate, even if you’re ignore its murderous and sadistic character.

This makes the ethical stance of most vigilante movies look downright progressive; or at least coherent.

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Sam (Karen Gillan) is working for some sort of criminal organization known as The Firm as a hit woman. As all professional killers do, she has a tragic past. Namely, her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey), who also worked as a killer for The Firm, disappeared fifteen years ago, never to be heard from or seen again.

Sam also has the career typical weakness for children (and perhaps the blind, too, though she doesn’t encounter any blind person during the course of the movie, thus I can’t say for sure), so when her newest victim turns out to have a little daughter (Chloe Coleman), she starts on the mandated way of protection, a way which will also lead to some surprising reunions and point towards methods to reconcile herself with her past.

On the way lie many dead thugs, a family reunion, and three awesome aunts -  librarians, traders in weapons and killers played by Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett.

Navot Papushado’s action comedy (with heavier emphasis on the action) Gunpowder Milkshake is one of those post-ironic, trope conscious movies that never quite seems to want to deconstruct the genre it is working in, making friendly nods and a couple of snarky remarks about the genre conventions it uses but also showing no shame nor embarrassment using them. Which is more than fine with me, seeing as this leads to a movie that seldom feels the need to congratulate itself for its cleverness, nor one that confuses small twists and turns in genre conventions with revolutionary acts. Rather, it uses its small changes and twists as more satisfying ways to fulfil genre expectations, finding the sweet spot where self-consciousness does not turn into self-(or genre-)loathing. Gunpowder Milkshake even does direct quotes from a panoply of classic genre movies well, again using little twists into the right directions to make even those things that aren’t exactly its own, very much its own indeed.

So, like this year’s other, even better, big female-centric action movie Black Widow, the film can be relaxed enough to treat the existence of its female action heroes as a matter of course, celebrating their awesomeness by also making it normal. This doesn’t preclude some mainstream feminist elements, but rather strengthens them by anchoring them in a world where a woman doing action hero things is the new normal and doesn’t need explanation or male approval anymore. Which to my eyes isn’t just all kinds of cool but also a pretty inclusive and practical way to move forward.

Of course, it does help the film’s project that Gillan’s has gotten rather great at that action movie star thing and comports herself very well in the action, the comedy and the drama bits of whatever she is given. She is also assisted by co-stars from a couple of generations before who are all actresses active in various genre spaces only an incel won’t love already, which offhandedly turns this into a film that celebrates some great actresses who have been paving the way for women in genre as a normality for decades.

Gunpowder Milkshake is aesthetically a pleasure, too, mixing super-stylized colour schemes and production design to enable less realistic and therefore more cool action, admitting many a silly and cheesy idea, and staging all of it – with this again wonderfully keeping in genre traditions – with increasing verve and style. There’s also a willingness to be weird on display that parallels the worldbuilding of the John Wick films, but in a way that feels less showy and more organic to me. You can insert my usual sarcastic remarks about Keanu here, too – Gillan and co are certainly the superior action actors (less flailing of arms etc).

In other words: it’s fun, not stupid, and looks great, too.