Wonderfully offbeat film!

Absolutely amazing

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This movie has a reasonable approval rating among the reviews submitted so far, but I found it to be rather heavy handed and silly. I'm generally pretty forgiving with 'noirs' because I love them all but this one is mostly annoying from start to finish. Robert Bray would have made a pretty good Mike Hammer but is held back by an appalling script and implausible story. He's 'over the top' angry and 'over the top' gritty and his blind quest for justice for a dead hooker he met briefly in a cafe is not a reasonable or appropriate reaction.The private dick and his cop friend at odds across a table is pure comedy theater and ends up diminishing the on-screen relationship for the viewers rather than nourishing it.Some things to watch, though... loads of 1950s Los Angeles scenery (both indoors and outside) to soak in. The girls are pretty, too and Donald Randolph makes the most of his lines with a maniacal rendering of the Colonel Holloway role. But that aside - there's really nothing here to see. The story is long and drawn out with several scenes extended for periods of time with no dialog and seemingly no purpose. Watch it if you must... but don't say I didn't warn you!

Unfortunately, Bray's bland version of iconic Mike Hammer can't hold together an over-extended 90-minutes. I might have responded differently had the actor evinced more than one emotionless expression and ditched that perfect wardrobe right out of Gentleman's Quarterly. Then too, there's that meandering screenplay whose threads come and go-- but crucially fail to weave anything like good suspense. Now, I'm no fan of the Cold War's "a slug in the commie gut" Mickey Spillane, but the movie as a whole fails to project his particular brand of blue-collar gusto. And that's despite the many half-clad babes that parade in and out. Also, looks to me like the screenplay goes awkwardly out of its way to emphasize Hammer's principled core. That's probably to reassure 50's audiences that this is not Spillane's ethically challenged version. In that sense, the movie's a somewhat revisionist working of the decade's favorite PI.Still the movie manages a few positives, especially Jan Chaney's beautifully shaded performance as a forlorn hooker named Red. It's one of the more subtly soulful turns I've seen. Note too how that same opening scene registers Hammer immediately as a tough guy but with heart. Then there's a good traveling look at LA's notorious freeways, which must have been an early morning shoot before the system-wide jam starts. Note too,the big glimpse of 50's upscale decor. No wonder this Hammer only parades around in fine suits. And I liked that imaginative junkyard set-up that proves even recyclables can be a menace. What the movie really needs however is a strong touch of style. I'm just sorry proved stylists like those of of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) didn't have a hand in this pedestrian production. As things stand, the programmer remains an appropriately obscure entry in an otherwise durable franchise.

(Some Spoilers) Somewhat better then you would have expected Mike Hammer flick with Robert Bray in the leading role as the tough as nails private eye who gets involved in a slew of murders as well as a hunt for the missing one million dollars Venacci Jewel collection. All this because he took the time and effort to help a young girl named Red, Jan Chaney, from Nebraska get herself straightened out and go, with Mike handing her a twenty, back home to mama and the boy she left behind.It's when Red is found dead, in a suspicious hit and run accident, with his name and address on her that Hammer goes into action in finding who's responsible for Red's untimely death; that he rightfully feels was a murder not an accident. It's when Hammer finds that this usual ring, with a V craved on it, that Red had on her was missing that he had his girl Friday, or secretary, Velda, Pamela Duncan, check it out for him.Finding out, from an 10 year old Time Magazine cover, the ring belonged to the long lost Venacci jewelry collection it became obvious that was the reason for Red's murder. Hammer traces down two persons who can help him break the case of the murdered redhead who happened to work with her at the nightclub the "Blue Bell". As expected the two persons whom Hammer got in contact with dancer Maria Garcia, Genie Coree, and the deft mute janitor Jane, Terrance De Morney, ended up being murdered before they can help Hammer in finding Red's killer or killers.The one clue that Hammer, with the help of his secretary Velda, came up with was what would lead him to find why and who was behind not only Red's but Jane and Marie's murders as well. It had to do with a rented apartment that was occupied by Col. Holloway, Donald Randolph, just after he was discharged from the military after the end of WWII. It was Col.Holloway, a US intelligence officer, who in fact stole the valuable Venacci Jewelry collection while he was serving with the US Army in Germany back in 1945! Having spent ten years behind bars Holloway was soon to be released from jail and it was certain to Hammer, with the jewels never being found, that the Venacci Jewels were somewhere hidden in that apartment that Holloway rented. What Hammer didn't know at the time is that not only Holloway was interested in finding the long lost, or hidden, Venacci Jewels but a gang of murderous jewels thieves lead by Frenchman LaRoche, Peter Mamakos, were also looking for them!A bit below average, compared to the previous Mike Hammer movie "Kiss Me Deadly", "My Gun is Quick" is rescued by actor Robert Bray's interpretation of the ruthless and unprincipled Mike Hammer portrayed by Ralph Meeker in the aforementioned film. In that Bray's Hammer, in the film "My Gun is Quick", has a heart of gold and played strictly by the rules. That besides him being as convincing, if not more so, as Meeker was in showing how brutal and ruthless Mike Hammer can be when he wanted to get information as well as slug it out with the bad guys.This in fact took away Hammer's both bad guy and anything to get results image and made you for once like him. Instead of making him, like Ralph Meeker, the best of a bad lot compared to those he fought which Mike Hammer comes across as in almost all of the films he's portrayed in.

The quintessential Mike Hammer (Robert Bray), haggard, menacing, but essentially a decent guy in a dirty world inhabited by ruthless killers, gets involved in the murder of a young aspiring actress, who only the night before he had met at a lonely downtown diner, and had helped out with bus fare back to her native Nebraska. Her death was related to a piece of jewelry she was carrying, part of a cache of stolen war time jewels. Forced to get to the bottom of the murder, not for money but because of his connection to the girl, he unravels the mystery in the typical Hammer fashion of payoffs and beatings. Released two years after Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, MGiQ is the poorer man's version, though it has its own charms, mostly in the way of the LA settings and Bray's portrayal, tired and unshaven, but with the determination of a pit bull.