THIS week marks the calm before the storm across UK cinemas, with very little by way of major releases ahead of next week’s return of James Bond in No Time To Die. Perhaps a chance to take stock of those recently missed? Aretha Franklyn biopic Respect continues to screen nationwide, alongside the likes of Annette, The War Below and Marvel’s latest hit: Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings.

For those looking in the right places, there’s also Gunpowder Milkshake. This is the, sadly derivative, Karen Gillan led action romp about a second-generation assassin pursuing revenge in a world dominated by brutish men. ‘They’ve been running things for a long, long time,’ opines the film, ‘and when they need someone to clean up their mess, they send me.’

Gillan plays Sam, daughter of Lena Headey’s hit woman Scarlet, who decides to enter the family business, despite being abandoned by her mother years prior. Geared up in a would-be iconic bomber jacket, and carrying her arsenal in a garish carry-all, adorned’I ♥ kittens’, Sam stalks around town, brooding from job to job at the bequest a gang so-called: The Firm.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence that sees the film released mere months after just that label was gifted the Royal Family by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Gunpowder Milkshake makes no bones of hiding its influences and yet deploys them with a rather unwieldy lack of flair. It is a film self-styled as ‘John Wick with Chicks’ but owes debts hugely to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.

An admirable will to insert feminism into the genre fails to truly set sail, however, even in spite of the dream casting.

Alongside Gillan and Headey, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino rock up to play kick ass librarians. They have fun but it’s never enough.

Though she has well proven her chops for action - across the Jumanji and Guardians of the Galaxy franchises - Gillan suffers here from the weight of being out of her own depth.

Extensive training in the lead up to the film’s production can only go so far to turn actor into believable assassin and such is never truly achieved here.

All that said, when it comes to bouncing off Headey, the one time Doctor Who star finds easy chemistry enough to hint at what might have been.