I’m watching The Gorge, a made-for-Apple movie that isn’t very good but will do the job on a lazy weekend morning. The story here is that there’s a gorge. It’s a very deep gorge, and its contents are so potentially dangerous that all of the world’s superpowers have deemed it necessary to entrust 24-hour surveillance of the gorge to … two people. Who are stationed on opposite sides of the gorge. One of those guards is professional idiot Miles Teller. The other is living Vermeer painting Anya Taylor-Joy. These two highly trained super soldiers aren’t allowed contact with one another from their respective watch tower positions. That would compromise the security of the gorge, and we can’t have that. We must protect this gorge.
However, thanks to tactical binoculars and a truly fantastical ability to write legible signs, our gorge-crossed lovers meet-cute at a distance and, in keeping with the spirit of tired romantic comedy, even manage to dance to the Ramones together before they both fall into the gorge. Once stuck down there, they must spend the rest of the movie killing knockoff Last of Us zombies while trapped in a knockoff Upside Down from Stranger Things. As I’ve told you, this isn’t a very good movie. And yet I have to stick with it from the opening scene, and do you know why? Because of the gun.
Taylor-Joy's character is a crack sniper, you see. When the movie opens, we’re on an earlier assignment with our heroine as she hides out in a blind and patiently waits for her miles-away target to come into her crosshairs. While she waits, she preps her gun. It’s a BIG gun. The kind that has to be mounted on a stand and stuff. It’s also got a big-ass silencer, because the bigger the silencer, the quieter the kill. That’s just physics.
This is, hands down, the most compelling scene in the film, because it depicts the grunt work of sniping in ways that I, the non-sniper, can appreciate. Oh what, did you think that a high-powered rifle just assembles itself? No, it does not. Show me a character who has to put that rifle together, and I know you’ve put a little bit of extra TLC into your ultra-violence. If The Gorge had more scenes like that opening set piece, it could have been a special movie. Instead, it was just The Gorge.
Later on, I’m watching The Day of the Jackal with my two sons. This is a prestige drama on Peacock that boasts an impeccable pedigree in Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne (de-thirstified almost entirely for this title role), co-star Lashana Lynch, and creator Ronan Bennett, whose Top Boy remains one of the best works of television I’ve ever seen. This show is considerably better than The Gorge, and do you know why? Gun.
Jackal moves at a brisk pace and, most important, wrings every kill for maximum suspense. Redmayne is an unassuming psychopath who kills big targets for bigger money so that he can afford his lavish estate in Cadiz with his gorgeous Spanish wife (good reason). And what does our jackal need to execute these missions with extreme prejudice? Again, gun.
The Jackal gets his guns custom made so that they can travel incognito—concealed as parts of a common suitcase or walking boot—and reach targets from miles away once assembled. We get to see all of that craftsmanship on display from episode to episode. Here’s Redmayne assembling a high-powered sniper rifle from the European equivalent of a book depository. Here’s Redmayne assembling a carbon fiber gun from high up in the rafters of an opera house. Here’s Redmayne assembling another gun that he jerry-rigged with a giant stabilizing gimbal, all while standing on a boat. Bennett makes Gun a fully realized character on this show and lemme tell you, I couldn’t wait to see what Gun would do next. It was well worth enduring some of the more shopworn “Trouble at home?” subplots in Jackal for Gun. This is a story that leans into its equipment, and is all the better for it.
You’ll find that this holds true across almost any crime story you watch. More gun assembly equals more good. No Country for Old Men is serious about its guns. Heat is serious about its guns. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is serious, but not too serious, about its guns. George Clooney’s The American is serious about its guns (and also, as a welcome bonus, about hot sex). The more a filmmaker pays attention to how guns are assembled, maintained, and used, the more confident I am in that filmmaker.
It's not just that I appreciate being in the hands of someone who sweats the details, but that I also get to learn about these horrible, mythical objects. In Jackal, Redmayne is attempting a long-distance sniping record with a gun that he has to assemble on site. The trigger is one of the final pieces to go in. On its own, the trigger is just an innocuous piece of metal. Once in place, you can feel how sensitive it is. You know what that piece of metal is capable of now that it’s part of a monstrous whole. You know that if Redmayne so much as looks at the trigger wrong, it’ll put a hole the side of a building three miles away. Then you watch Redmayne recalibrate his telescopic sight over and over to get his aim atomically precise, all without disrupting the precious trigger. All of that builds suspense. When you spend minutes at a time with Chekhov’s Gun, it makes the anticipation for it to go off almost unbearable. That’s filmmaker of the highest … [Dr. Evil voice] … caliber?
So the next time you’re watching an action flick, be sure to ask yourself if the filmmakers in charge are giving you good Gun. Do they know how these things work? Do they know why one gun is of superior quality to the other? Do they know that guns have to be CLEANED? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then you’re good to go. If not, well then throw that movie into a fucking gorge.
