Guns Up Review: Christina Ricci’s Mob Wife Makes Murder Look Classy

Director/ Writer: Edward Drake Title – Guns Up
Distribution: Vertical Entertainment (US), VVS Films (Canada/Australia)
Production: Millennium Films, BondIt Media Capital
Release Date: 2025
Rating: R | 1h 32m
Review by: Mother of Movie

Cast: Kevin James, Christina Ricci, Luis Guzmán, Maximilian Osinski, Melissa Leo, Francis Cronin, Timothy V. Murphy, Joey Diaz, Solomon Hughes, Leo Easton Kelly

 

The Setup: Paul Blart Goes Full Mob Enforcer

If the logline sounds like every mob-exit thriller since The Godfather Part III, that’s because it absolutely is. Guns Up doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It just pivots in some handlers and bravito into the mix and hopes for the best.

Kevin James playing a mob enforcer sounds like the setup to a Saturday Night Live sketch that got a theatrical budget. Yet here we are with Guns Up. A film that asks: what if the guy from King of Queens had a body count higher than his sitcom episode tally? Director and writer Edward Drake (Cosmic Sin, Broil) clearly saw Kevin Lovenan’s villain turn in Becky and thought, “Let’s give America’s favorite mall cop some mad fighting skills, a weapon of choice, and some moral ambiguity.”

The premise is straightforward: Ray Hayes (James) is a former cop turned mob muscle trying to exit “The Family” for a quieter life flipping burgers. When his current big bad, Michael Temple (Melissa Leo), finds herself on the wrong end of a revolver, his entire world combusts faster than you can say “witness protection.” With his wife Alice (Christina Ricci) and kids Henry (Leo Easton Kelly) and Siobhan in tow, Ray has to figure out how to outrun rival gangster Lonny Costigan (Timothy V. Murphy) before his family becomes collateral damage in a turf war. Think A History of Violence on a Millennium Films budget, and somehow it works.

The Supporting Cast: Familiar Faces in Familiar Roles

Luis Guzmán appears as Ignatius Locke in the film’s poker-game cold open. Somehow looking exactly as ageless as he did in Carlito’s Way three decades ago. At this point, I’m convinced Guzmán, Keanu Reeves, and Liam Neeson have a secret vampire pact. Someone check for bite marks or victims held in a basement somewhere. He’s underutilized here (a recurring theme in his career, tragically), but his weathered charisma adds something special to scenes that would otherwise play like Direct-to-Streaming Action Movie Bingo.

Melissa Leo as Michael Temple and Joey Diaz as Charlie Brooks round out the ensemble. They bring in the kind of lived-in weariness that comes from actors who’ve seen every variation of this script. They’re professionals delivering professional work in a film that needed exactly that baseline competence to function. No one’s phoning it in. But no one’s breaking new ground either; think of it as comfort food acting for a comfort food genre piece.

The real head-scratcher? The Hayes kids, Henry and Siobhan, who react to their kidnapping and the subsequent gang war with the emotional range of teenagers asked to put their phones away during dinner. Henry literally carries a book and a flashlight through a hostage situation like he’s camping in the backyard. It’s either an odd commentary on Gen Z’s apocalyptic numbness (unlikely) or a script that couldn’t figure out what to do with child characters beyond making them MacGuffins with legs (extremely likely). They’re not bad performances, they’re just… there, like NPCs in a video game waiting for the player character to rescue them so the plot can progress.

When Christina Ricci Becomes the Real Heavy Hitter

Let’s address the elephant, or rather, the assassin, in the room. Christina Ricci’s Alice isn’t just the supportive mob wife wringing her hands while hubby does the heavy lifting. In a third-act revelation that genuinely elevates the film from “generic action flick” to “oh, that’s why she signed on,” we learn Alice is the daughter of a butcher whose shop was torched by Lonny years ago. She didn’t just survive the flames. She became the goddamn phoenix, training as an assassin and eventually carving out Lonny’s eye in retribution.

This backstory is delivered through fragmented flashbacks. It feels like fever dreams scored by ominous organ plunks, transforming Alice from damsel to dark knight. When the climactic diner shootout erupts, and Alice goes full John Wick with kitchen knives and a fire extinguisher, it’s the film’s most electrifying sequence. Ricci, who’s been steadily building her villain era portfolio since way before Yellowjackets, brings a cold-blooded precision to Alice. It makes you wonder why Hollywood keeps casting her as quirky sidekicks when she clearly thrives as the one holding the blade.

The fight choreography deserves its own standing ovation. Drake and his stunt team craft really cool and easy-to-watch hand-to-hand combat without veering into superhero territory. Power boxes become improvised weapons, and diner tables transform into shields. The street brawl finale uses urban geography (fire hydrants, parked cars, and that one mysteriously placed shopping cart). It’s fun, and sometimes that’s enough.

There’s a tension in Drake’s work between ambition and limitation. The script gestures toward deeper themes. There’s generational trauma (Alice’s butcher backstory), the impossibility of escaping your past (Ray’s doomed diner dream), and the cyclical nature of violence (the final scene where the entire family is armed). However, it never commits to exploring them beyond surface-level nods. It’s like watching someone assemble IKEA furniture without reading the instructions. All the pieces are there, but the final product wobbles when you sit on it.

The film’s 92-minute runtime works in its favor. In an era of bloated action epics that mistake length for substance, Guns Up respects your time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a pulp paperback you buy at an airport. Almost disposable, mildly diverting, and forgotten by the time you reach your gate.

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Absurdity as Catharsis

Alice confronts Lonny in his car and, rather than shooting him like a rational assassin, opts for a cleaver while he’s trapped in the driver’s seat. It’s gloriously impractical. Fortunately, it’s thematically appropriate given her butcher lineage, and the scene plays out just fine.

This tonal whiplash, oscillating between crime thriller and Grindhouse-adjacent excess, is both Guns Up‘s greatest strength and most glaring weakness. The film can’t decide if it wants to be A History of Violence or Smokin’ Aces, so it splits the difference and becomes neither. Yet there’s something endearing about its schizophrenia. Like watching a cover band that can’t quite nail the original but accidentally creates something interesting through sheer good luck.

Three Months and a Lot of Therapy Later

The epilogue, where the Hayes family opens their diner, now all packing heat, is either a darkly comic coda about America’s gun culture or a lazy setup for a franchise that will never materialize. I’m leaning toward the latter. Though the image of Kevin James trekking his way through a bunch of different restaurants is the kind of absurdist Americana that could work as a black comedy series. Someone pitch this to FX immediately.

What Guns Up ultimately delivers is a perfectly serviceable time-passer for action junkies who’ve exhausted their Letterboxd watchlists. The wheel still rolls. The fight choreography elevates it above direct-to-streaming dreck, and Ricci’s performance hints at the film this could have been with a stronger script. Let’s not forget Kevin James, who proves he can carry an action lead role as well as a goofy pudding husband who’s emasculated by his on screen TV series wife.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of store-brand cereal. You know it’s not a brand name, but it’s sweet enough to finish the box.

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Final Verdict

 

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Guns Up is rated 

3.5 Bullets in a chamber that should’ve held six out of 5

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Films with Similar Vibes

If you enjoyed Guns Up, check out these mob-exit thrillers with similar DNA:

1. A History of Violence (2005) — David Cronenberg’s meditation on inescapable pasts, but with actual thematic depth
2. Running Scared (2006) — Paul Walker in a hyperkinetic crime thriller that doesn’t know when to quit (in a good way)
3. The Family (2013) — Robert De Niro as a mobster in witness protection; tonally inconsistent but entertaining
4. Smokin’ Aces (2006) — Joe Carnahan’s maximalist hitman circus that Guns Up occasionally channels

Edward Drake’s Filmmaking Stamp

Edward Drake churns out B-movie thrillers with workmanlike efficiency. Get in, shoot the action, and get out before the budget runs dry. Guns Up continues this tradition: competent action, functional storytelling, and just enough Christina Ricci and Kevin James to make it memorable. His films (Apex, Cosmic Sin, Gasoline Alley) share that aesthetic. But we still like it.