Not the Usual Suspects

When screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie became a director in his own right, he was clear about at least one thing: He knew exactly what kind of movie he didn’t want to make.

“I was obsessed with cinema’s ability to completely skirt the consequences of any action,” he says. “Contemporary filmmaking does not ever want to upset you. You can watch ‘Independence Day’ frame by frame--massive destruction and not a single dead body.

“You’re never allowed to deal with death because this is a fun summer movie and they want to minimize the sense of loss and maximize the sense of pleasure. After I won the Oscar for the ‘Usual Suspects’ script, everyone expected me to direct a crime movie. So I said all right, but I’ll do it the way I think it should be done, and if I do that, no one will ever ask me to do it again.”

No one will ever accuse McQuarrie of trying to maximize anybody’s sense of pleasure. There are moments in the crime movie he finally made, the ultra-hard-boiled kidnap drama “The Way of the Gun” (opening Friday), that seem calculated to be as brutally shocking and off-putting as possible. Some of the violence goes so far beyond the norm for an action movie that you’d swear the sequences were spliced in from a gothic horror show about the Spanish Inquisition. Even viewers who think they’re tough enough for a typical post-Tarantino gunplay film are likely to be brought up short.

At the outset, though, “The Way of the Gun” seems to fit neatly into the new indie-thriller subgenre of photogenic Gen-X crooks who get in over their bloody heads. Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro play vagabond hoodlums in the Southwest who reach for the big payoff, kidnapping a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) who is carrying a rich man’s baby. What they don’t realize, until it’s way too late, is that the father isn’t just a normal well-heeled macher, he’s a Mafia banker, a money-laundering expert (played with a bone-deep sense of corruption by Scott Wilson) who has every motive in the world for disposing of the perpetrators with the assistance of some very scary hired muscle.

Intense scenes of gunplay and torture follow--not to mention a soon-to-be-infamous depiction of a C-section birth, performed, without benefit of anesthetic, on a rumpled bed in a seedy Mexican brothel.

The sheer gut-wrenching intensity of these scenes might be almost bearable if we had reliable, comforting central characters to root for, firmly grounded heroes to guide us through the maelstrom. But McQuarrie is intent upon never allowing us to get a firm grip on his protagonists. Are they hapless antiheroes, as they at first appear, or just villains like all the rest, as blackhearted as everybody else in the grim state-of-nature landscape of the movie?

McQuarrie warns us, in the first place, not to take anything the protagonists say about themselves at face value: “They are portrayed to us in the voice-over narration as a couple of guys who are just bumming around looking to make their fortune. But don’t forget, it’s Parker [Phillippe] himself who is saying that. Why should we believe him? What we come to realize is that there’s a lot more going on here than he cares to tell us.”

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At times, McQuarrie exploits the habits we’ve acquired watching commercial action films to set us up for his strongest shocks. The kidnappers are initially portrayed as attractive and almost goofy, natural underdogs. They even seem to experience a sentimental change of heart, switching sides to rescue the captive girl from the even-badder bad guys. But instead of riding to the rescue with six-guns blazing, heedless of his own safety, Del Toro’s Longbaugh finds a protected perch on a nearby hillside and begins coolly blowing people away with a sniper rifle, at one point shooting a Mexican police officer in the back, a double no-no for the “hero” of an action picture.

“The cinematographer, Dick Pope, reacted strongly to the sniper scene,” McQuarrie says. “He said, ‘You know, I like these guys, I’ve understood everything that they’ve done up until this point. But this I can’t accept.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly why it’s happening now, and that’s exactly why we’re leaving it in.’ It’s only as you begin to get invested in these people that I say, ‘Guess what? You may have picked the wrong side. You only picked Parker and Longbaugh because one of them has the voice-over, and they look the coolest.’ ”

McQuarrie did have some real-life experience to draw on for his cinematic scenes of violence. He can vividly recall getting caught up in a grocery store robbery late one night in Berkeley. And he went nose to nose with gang members and drug dealers in his 20s, when he worked as a security guard at a movie theater in Sayreville, N.J., situations he defused, he says, by exploiting his unthreatening appearance.

“I was this red-haired, freckle-faced kid with huge horn-rimmed glasses,” he recalls. “I could say, ‘Why are you yelling at me? I’m Opie. You could break me in half.’ Then the bad guys would laugh and the tension would evaporate.”

McQuarrie, who is 31 now but looks 10 years younger, grew up in comfortable Princeton Junction, N.J., where, with his movie-mad high school buddy Bryan Singer, he plotted a future film career. McQuarrie and Singer made “Public Access” together in 1993 and “The Usual Suspects” in 1995, for which McQuarrie copped the best original screenplay Oscar.

Singer then went off on his own to direct “Apt Pupil” and this summer’s big hit “X-Men.” They are no longer a team, McQuarrie admits, but he declines to discuss the apparently painful split. He is writing “The Prisoner,” an adaptation of the classic 1960s TV series, for “Con Air” director Simon West.

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McQuarrie’s memories of being stuck on the sidelines in violent situations influenced his staging of action in “The Way of the Gun,” he says. He violated the standard rule of thumb for suspenseful action, dating at least to Hitchcock, of placing the viewer inside the action as it unfolds, identifying strongly with one of the participants. Instead, McQuarrie says, he positioned the camera “to give the viewer the sense of being an accidental bystander.”

“In the gunfights, I want to suggest that you are hiding behind the guy doing the shooting, and that if you step out you are going to get nailed. It’s the gunfight as chess match,” he says of the film’s protracted final shootout. “It’s about constantly trying to position yourself so that you can see him and he can’t see you. Sarno [a veteran fixer, played by James Caan, who works for the Mafia banker] is the best at that. . . . He’s been around long enough to learn how not to get shot, and he has the scars to prove it. Sarno is the guy who knows that if he gets emotional, he’s going to be dead.”

It’s not hard to understand why some people find the worldview of “The Way of the Gun” a little too grim for comfort. “If you don’t look and you don’t listen,” McQuarrie allows, “then ‘Way of the Gun’ is a dark movie. But there are huge issues of God and faith and redemption in it too, as there were in ‘The Usual Suspects.’ Whether or not conventional justice is served, everybody gets theirs in the end.

“It’s like Sarno says, ‘Karma is justice without the satisfaction.’ To me, justice is served when the victim finds some peace and the villain is left to suffer the consequences of his own actions.”