Tom Cruise's Favorite Director's Breakout Action Thriller Is Officially Free to Stream

Haven't seen it? Maybe you should

Haven't seen it? Maybe you should

As strange as it may be from a modern perspective, there was a point at which Christopher McQuarrie did not work with Tom Cruise. 20 years before McQuarrie directed four Mission: Impossible movies in a row, he got on moviegoers' radar by writing the Oscar-winning script for 1995's The Usual Suspects.

We don't talk quite as much about Usual Suspects as we used to, as much of it's built around a truly incredible performance by the since-disgraced Kevin Spacey, but it's one of the greatest movies in the neo-noir crime revival of the '90s. In theory, that and the Oscar should've given McQuarrie a blank check to do whatever he wanted. Instead, he was unemployed for the next five years.

Finally, McQuarrie wrote and directed his own follow-up to Usual Suspects just to put himself back on the film industry's radar. That was 2000's The Way of the Gun, which is an angry reaction to McQuarrie's years in Hollywood. It's an action movie that deliberately does everything that a film executive wouldn't want to see come across their desk, such as long silences, surprisingly subtle plot beats, and two of the most deliberately unsympathetic protagonists in American movie history. If you brought this to Kevin Zaslav, he’d spontaneously combust.

At the time of its release, neither critics nor audiences quite seemed to know what to do with The Way of the Gun. It didn't help that its distributor, Artisan Entertainment, tried to market it as yet another idiosyncratic post-Tarantino crime caper, right at the point at which those sorts of movies were rapidly falling out of fashion.

Since then, it seems like a new crop of movie fans rediscovers The Way of the Gun every couple of years, especially now that McQuarrie's more widely known. If you're interested in seeing McQuarrie's directorial debut, as well as one of the most cheerfully vicious action films made at the turn of the century, The Way of the Gun is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

There's always free cheese in a mousetrap

Parker (Ryan Phillippe, trying to get out from under his post-Cruel Intentions teen idol status) and Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro) are a pair of petty criminals on the lookout for one big score. When they hear about Robin (Juliette Lewis), a surrogate mother who's being paid $1 million for her services, they immediately decide to kidnap her for ransom. At no time do they consider what sort of person might be willing to pay that kind of cash to a surrogate, but they’ve got nothing to lose.

That puts Parker and Longbaugh up against a local money launderer, his enforcer Sarno (James Caan), and their unusually dedicated bodyguards (Taye Diggs, Nicky Katt). It also unwittingly puts Parker and Longbaugh on center stage in a complicated situation, where almost everyone in it already had a plan to betray someone else. Their unexpected intercession is the spark that makes this powderkeg ignite.

The first big lift that Way of the Gun demands of the viewer is that none of the characters are particularly likable, and that’s very much on purpose. It occupies a midway point between a road-movie Western and a classic film noir, where no one’s hands were ever quite clean to begin with. Parker in particular establishes his character by sucker-punching a woman (Susan Silverman) in the first five minutes, then doubles down with a homophobic rant. If you're looking for an unproblematic favorite in The Way of the Gun, you'll either need to broaden your standards or get used to disappointment.

That aside, The Way of the Gun has never gotten enough credit for its action choreography, which is years ahead of its time. McQuarrie enlisted his brother Doug, who was an active-duty Navy SEAL in 2000, as a weapons consultant for the film. Every character is adept with their chosen firearms, uses realistic tactics, and goes out of their way to minimize their exposure to danger. Even Parker and Longbaugh, when the bullets start flying, use cover and teamwork like they're both ex-SWAT. It's a degree of attention to combat detail that wouldn't come back into fashion until the first John Wick 14 years later.

Further, no one in The Way of the Gun is stupid. Parker and Longbaugh, for all their screwups, are weirdly good at what they do. No one ever picks up an "idiot ball" in The Way of the Gun, and if they die, it's usually due to something they couldn't have predicted or realistically prevented. It's a relatively subtle quality of the film, but it jumps right out at you, especially if you've seen a lot of cheap American action movies. McQuarrie was careful to keep everyone in the movie on an even keel, rather than making any single party into a sacrificial lamb.

It's fair to call The Way of the Gun something of an acquired taste. It's an action movie for people who are kind of sick of action movies, which goes out of its way to contradict or defy most of the genre's hallmarks. While much of it hasn't aged well at all, especially the first five minutes, there's a lot of The Way of the Gun that feels like a weird breath of fresh air in 2026.

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The Way of the Gun is currently streaming on Tubi.