One expects as much from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, the man responsible for The Usual Suspects stellar screenplay. The film is populated with well-casted characters and distributes the intrigue quite evenly for the first half. It's a winning performance, played temperately for maximum laughs and menace.
Mistakes begin when the action heads south to Mexico for a desperately protracted finale.
The film's lively first hour normalizes into a bloody shoot-out situation, but not before developing characters enough to make the viewer care what happens to them. Whereas The Usual Suspects created tight alleys of motives and suspicion, Way of the Gun overshoots this and ends up in neo-noir gridlock.