"Die in a Gunfight" slick and flashy but all over the place with little to care about

Die in a Gunfight (2021)

At its core, “Die in a Gunfight” is a love story. It’s not Shakespeare, but it does evoke “Romeo and Juliet,” with two people who can’t be together because of their longtime family feud. For all of director Collin Schiffli’s confidence behind the camera, there is little to no connection to the central couple. There’s such a focus on being edgy and cavalier that when the film asks the viewer to care about a shallow relationship (and see who actually dies in a gunfight), it starts to feel tonally all over the place. Meretricious and too cute by half, “Die in a Gunfight” is a case of feast and famine, expending so much style and energy on so little.

The Montagues and Capulets had it good compared to the Gibbons and the Rathcarts, who have carried on a “blood feud” for generations. The disgraced son, Ben Gibbon (Diego Boneta) could never feel anything until he met and fell in love with Mary Rathcart (Alexandra Daddario), who’s also the black sheep of her family. But they could never be together because of their rivalrous fathers. Ben continues to get into fights, and Mary returns to Manhattan from a boarding school in Paris, where her father has hired Terrence (Justin Chatwin) to spy on her all this time. Mary’s father wants her to marry the creepy, clingy Terrence, but when Ben and Mary’s eyes meet again, that romantic sense of longing hits them both like a bullet. To constantly block them from being together, there’s also a target on the head of a whistleblower within Mary’s father’s tech company, and Ben gets caught up with wild-card hired gun Wayne (Travis Fimmel) and his ethereal wife Barbie (Emmanuelle Chriqui, who’s bringing free-spirited gusto to a thankless role).

“Die in a Gunfight” shows some promise early on to be slick, brash, propulsive fun, but it runs out early rather than later. Director Collin Schiffli (2018’s “All Creatures Here Below”) seems to be cramming in every cinematic flourish into one film in case he never makes another one. There’s animation, voice-over narration by Billy Crudup, rewinds, freeze frames, split screens, and an overall self-referential tone. Schiffli showcases a lot of vision on display, but no such discipline. While the film never has a chance to get dull on a visual level, the script by co-writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (2018’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp”) feels scattered with too many tangents, some of which are more interesting than Ben and Mary. It also feels the need to show us the names of every character with title cards upon introductions, even if most of them are expendable.

Diego Boneta and Alexandra Daddario are definitely giving the material their all as star-crossed lovers Ben and Mary, but both actors being attractive doesn’t automatically make the characters’ forbidden love worth the investment. Though he’s kept mostly in the margins, Wade Allain-Marcus has one of those captivating presences on screen without actually having much to work with as Ben’s hard-drinking right-hand man Mukul, the Mercutio in this Ritchie-Tarantino-Shakespearean wannabe. Never pretending to conceal its influences, “Die in a Gunfight” also never quite finds its own identity.

Grade: C  

Lionsgate is releasing “Die in a Gunfight” (92 min.) in select theaters, on digital and on demand on July 16, 2021.