Christopher McQuarrie won an Oscar for his black-humoured script for The Usual Suspects, a dense character study and thriller with a plot as labyrinthine as a plate of spaghetti.

Now he adds the directing badge to his writing credit, and the result is another twisting, stomach-knotting thriller; another bleak, ice-cool character study and another piece of top-drawer writing by McQuarrie. You need only glance at the cast list to know he is a magnet for Hollywood's A-list looking for something on the unpredictable B roads of movie making. There's pretty boy Ryan Philippe; Benicio Del Toro, that hang-dog cross between Brad Pitt and Robert Mitchum; the queen of trauma, Juliette Lewis, and veteran supreme James Caan, all revelling in oddball roles.

Then add the crossfire wit of Tarantino and the balletic shoot-out gunplay of Robert 'El Mariarchi' Rodriguez, and The Way Of The Gun is one devilishly hot, tourniquet-taut Unusual Suspect.

Philippe, playing against type as a psycho, is partner in crime with the calmer Del Toro: doomed losers and insensitive, misogynist young men with more guns than brains, whose latest money-making venture involves kidnapping the heavily pregnant Lewis, a surrogate-mum-to-be with a £1 million dollar deal to deliver the baby goods for businessman Scott Wilson. Not a wise move: this businessman is from the Scorsese school of hard knocks and mob connections, with a pair of bodyguard hit men out to grab the baby by any means.

Lewis, as neurotic as a bitten fingernail as always, is a slippery customer with her own intentions, and Caan's remorseless mobster "bagman" is out to grind down the kidnappers too, looking for his own cut.

The Way Of The Gun is that rarity: an American action and reaction movie with a true sense of pain and panic, full of real guts and gore, that refuses to play to Hollywood clich as every tortured soul is laid bare on the dusty highway to hell.