Tommy Guns Review: A Genre-Shifting Exploration of War That Pulls Its Punches

Carlos Conceição’s Tommy Guns unfolds less as a cunning mashup of war-movie and horror-comedy tropes than as a flatfooted genre hybrid. Set in 1974, during the final year of Portuguese rule in Angola, the film begins in the mode of a historical drama before transitioning into a dark comedy and then morphing into a zombie riff that tritely uses the walking dead as a commentary on the legacy of colonialism and military malpractice.

Given that films depicting the colonial conflict in Africa during the 1960s and ’70s typically adhere to a resolutely realist style, Conceição’s more phantasmagoric inclinations at least bear the coveted trait of attempted originality. The film’s lengthy opening, which functions as a prologue, initially appears straightforward in its deliberate storytelling, as a Portuguese nun (Leonor Silveira), a Portuguese soldier (Sílvio Vieira), and a young Angolan woman (Ulé Baldé) cross paths in ways that turn on violence and power dynamics. But when the title card finally hits the screen almost half an hour in, it’s partially an announcement of Conceição’s flair for the dramatic and partially a gauche foreshadowing of the punches soon to be pulled.

That opening is an aptly grim and stylized rendering of how corrupted ideologies, betrayal, and violence go hand in hand. But what follows is less convincing in how Conceição backtracks on these headier notions by depicting a series of barracks mishaps through dark slapstick comedy.

Enter a cartoonishly masculine colonel (Gustavo Sumpta) in charge of whipping a ragtag group of Portuguese soldiers into shape. Tommy Guns then introduces Apolonia (Anabela Moreira), a sex worker hired to deflower the colonel’s soldiers, and who becomes a central character alongside Zé (João Arrais), the unit’s most intelligent and affable recruit. Eventually, things go haywire when Angolan zombies begin rising from the ground to carry out their revenge for years of oppression and murder perpetrated by the Portuguese government and military.

The film’s major misstep, aside from being unable to wring anything fresh from its zombie metaphor, is its botched comedy. For one, the deadpan expressions on the faces of the Angolan undead doesn’t land as a sight gag, and it remains unclear to the end if Conceição means to portray the ragtag band of Portuguese soldiers as villains or anti-heroes. Mati Diop’s Atlantics uses a similar metaphor with a defter, stranger hand, and while its tone differs significantly from Tommy Guns, it finds subtle, unsettling humor on the expressionless faces of residents in Dakar who’ve been possessed by the spirits of African refugees lost at sea.

By contrast, Conceição quickly shuttles everything into an overtly jokey genre register during the film’s final third, meaning that any lingering possibility for deeper resonances are sacrificed in the name of suddenly, and explicitly, evoking Day of the Dead, which also pitted zombies against a group of soldiers but in much more gory fashion. But perhaps because the prospect of seeing Portuguese soldiers blast their way through Angolan zombies doesn’t sit well with Conceição—and because the film also shows affection for its Portuguese characters—Tommy Guns ends with what amounts to a series of empty clicks rather than bullets going boom.