Girl With Gun
Year: 2007
Director: Russ Emanuel
Stars: Tract O’Connor, Michelle Lee, Michelle Martin
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Studio: Russem Productions
Running Time: 15 Mins
Review Rating: 2.5 Stars
Girl With Gun is about an ordinary working woman that has a 
relationship with an ordinary guy named Dan and a best friend who lives a perfect life, but unknown to them, she lives a double life as an assassin known as the Nightingale. Her alter ego helps protect the people who can’t help themselves. Soon her relationship and business cross paths, when she sees Dan at a restaurant where she is targeting her latest target, an underground mafia boss. Soon that mission goes wrong when she begins to lose focus of her mission, as another assassin comes in to save the mob boss from her. If things couldn’t get anything worse, her relationship with Dan goes up in smokes. This makes contemplate her life and existence, while she must decide what is going to be her next move.
After watching Girl With Gun, I felt like I watched half a film. The good things that I took away from this film were the directing and the acting. Russ Emanuel’s direction was good. His direction of the action sequences was good for the most part. They were entertaining and helped made the film respectable, as the screenplay (which I’ll get to in a second) wasn’t that great. His direction of the actors was very good also. I liked how he was able to make his actors bring personality to their characters. It made the film entertaining.
Emily Haris’s screenplay is the film’s weakest point. It’s also, the main reason why this s
creenplay and film fails. This is short film that could have used an extra fifteen minutes or so. The main character that Haris creates is an interesting character but my main problem with this was that I wanted more about the character once the film ended. The screenplay also had an identiy crisis, as it felt like two films once we get the main character’s love life. The first film felt like an average superhero movie with some good action. The second felt like a relationship film gone wrong. Once the film got to into the main character’s love life, that’s where it went downhill, as it felt like those two films came crashing into one. She makes the main character’s boyfriend as another character that is just there to chew scenery because he never gets into any of the action scenes and we don’t know much about him. Also, I thought the film was left open-ended, where there was no resolution with the mafia plot line. I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish by that, but he should have been ended, instead of leaving it open-ended.
relationship with an ordinary guy named Dan and a best friend who lives a perfect life, but unknown to them, she lives a double life as an assassin known as the Nightingale. Her alter ego helps protect the people who can’t help themselves. Soon her relationship and business cross paths, when she sees Dan at a restaurant where she is targeting her latest target, an underground mafia boss. Soon that mission goes wrong when she begins to lose focus of her mission, as another assassin comes in to save the mob boss from her. If things couldn’t get anything worse, her relationship with Dan goes up in smokes. This makes contemplate her life and existence, while she must decide what is going to be her next move.After watching Girl With Gun, I felt like I watched half a film. The good things that I took away from this film were the directing and the acting. Russ Emanuel’s direction was good. His direction of the action sequences was good for the most part. They were entertaining and helped made the film respectable, as the screenplay (which I’ll get to in a second) wasn’t that great. His direction of the actors was very good also. I liked how he was able to make his actors bring personality to their characters. It made the film entertaining.
Emily Haris’s screenplay is the film’s weakest point. It’s also, the main reason why this s
creenplay and film fails. This is short film that could have used an extra fifteen minutes or so. The main character that Haris creates is an interesting character but my main problem with this was that I wanted more about the character once the film ended. The screenplay also had an identiy crisis, as it felt like two films once we get the main character’s love life. The first film felt like an average superhero movie with some good action. The second felt like a relationship film gone wrong. Once the film got to into the main character’s love life, that’s where it went downhill, as it felt like those two films came crashing into one. She makes the main character’s boyfriend as another character that is just there to chew scenery because he never gets into any of the action scenes and we don’t know much about him. Also, I thought the film was left open-ended, where there was no resolution with the mafia plot line. I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish by that, but he should have been ended, instead of leaving it open-ended.Girl With Gun is a film that looked promising but has a screenplay that fails to the point that you’re left wanting more.
Hey Anthony,
Thanks for the review of the film!
Russ
hey Anthony,
I challenge you to consider that maybe exactly all the thematic elements you described were constructed with intent by the filmmaker. As a woman, and a martial artist, and a lover of indie film, I took in this film as largely caricature. I have watched every bad and mediocre martial arts film out there. This film just freakin' shattered so many of those stereotypes!
Try looking at it from a different angle - kinda slapstick or Zatoichi like symbolism, and I wonder if you might have a different response.
The intelligence behind this film truly arises from some intelligence around the stereotypes it addresses.
respectfully,
Paula
I would like to check this out.
You can check it out at Cinequest Online Viewer's Voice.