I’m not going to lie to you, I am a MASSIVE Katie McGrath Fangirl, and I decided to watch this movie after seeing GIFs of her on Twitter firing a sniper rifle with a smirk on her face. After watching the trailer, I decided to give it a go and base it on its merits as a spy movie.
This trailer doesn’t even show the scene I waited 84 years to see
The Throwaways is a Crackle Original, directed by Toni Bui (Three Seasons) ,and stars Sam Huntington (Superman Returns) as the Brains – Drew Reynolds. Drew, who has been hacking under the name Blackjack to take down anyone that he sees as being a threat to the United States, is captured by the CIA and is given a choice, either spend the next 30 years in jail, or work for them to capture a greater threat. Some other hacker has stolen a program called ‘Pantheon’ which can be used to take over the world all thanks to a special ‘Key’ which lets you access the whole internet! Our evil hacker has decided to auction it off to the highest bidder (in true movie villain fashion) and it’s up to Drew to put together a team to stop him in exchange for total immunity for using his hacker skills. Drew, an isolated socially awkward hacker, agrees on the condition that he can choose his own team.
Be still my heart, your fangirling time will come!
His team comprises of Gloria (Center – a spy who has been side lined to using her feminine ways to ‘extract’ information from targets played by Katie McGrath of Merlin and Supergirl), Dan Fisher (Left – the muscle of the operation who has been side lined to the basement for his short temper and violence on missions played by Kevin Dillon of Entourage), and Dmitri (Right – the ex-KGB agent and getaway driver who has been side lined for his desertion played by Christian Hillborg of The Last Kingdom). The entire team has been chosen for their designation by the CIA as ‘Throwaways’ – expendable agents.
Their first outing – tracking the IP address of the person who fixed the back door to the ‘Pantheon’ program to find the location of the key – doesn’t go according to plan. The CIA agent assigned to the mission, Connelly, enters a skin-head bar to locate the laptop and runs afoul of the locals, leading Fisher to enter the bar and cause a brawl. Dmitri, ever the deserter, tries to flee the scene, only to be knocked out by our girl Gloria by the steering wheel, who then takes over the driving and pulls out some sick moves and a gun, allowing the team to leave the bar relatively unscathed.
Step two – finding the person who is brokering the deal (a person unimaginatively called The Broker) and get to the hacker – Teebs – that way has about the same amount of success. The team first deploy Gloria to seduce The Broker, only to find out that Fisher is more his type. While arguing over if Fisher should make a move, The Broker starts to flee with Gloria and the rest of the team in hot pursuit. Connelly, leading the operation, doesn’t understand the value of Gloria on the team and see’s her only as someone who can seduce and sleep with targets to get what they want, tells her to hold back when she is the only person who could take The Broker down. Connelly’s ineptitude causes The Broker to get away on a subway train and for Drew to lose the signal of The Broker’s phone.
Back at the Bulgarian Assembly building, the leader of the team and Drew’s former mentor, Lt. Col. Christopher Holden, is shot while gaining access to the cell towers for the team to track The Broker. With Holden out of commission, Connelly benches the team and decides to lead a new team to find Teebs and the key to ‘Pantheon’. Drew, it turns out, did not tell the team the full story about how he found them. He tells the team that they are disposable and that he was hoping that they would fail so that he could go back to working alone. Gloria leads the walk out, telling Drew ‘Why don’t you just go back to playing with your little toys?’ I’m sure there is a joke to be made here, but I will refrain for now.
The new team doesn’t seem to be up to the task. The signal has now been picked up again, and Connelly leads a tactical team in to an abandoned building, only to find out that it is a trap, in that The Broker has been murdered and chopped in to pieces and placed inside of baskets on top of a mule. No, I do not mean something like a Drug Mule, I mean a legit Mule. One by one, the team are taken out by a team of assassins, and their mission is at an end. Meanwhile, back in mission control, Drew has a friend in Cyber security pull up everything that he has on Teebs. Holden is able to find the assassin of Connelly and identifies her as Bes, a chameleon agent who is pretending to be Teebs’ girlfriend but is secretly working for Konstantin – an pro-Soviet Russian defector, who just so happens to be the highest bidder for the key. Konstantin orders Teebs to plunge Bulgaria in to a blackout with Bes’ gun pointed at his head.
Drew has not been sitting idly by however, and has managed to find Teebs, with his friends help, by tracking him through his Vape. With no other teams available to move out, Drew is forced to apologize to his crew and after a heartfelt speech, its time to gear up and move out to Konstantin’s base.
Out of the way boys! It’s time for the fangirling to commence!
[Sorry not sorry for the amount of GIFs which are about to come your way, but you will understand when you see why]
The boys are busy trying to decide how they are going to get in to the base, realizing that they have to take out the guards. Fisher, thinking that he is the big man, pulls out a sniper rifle and starts to line up his shot. However Drew, having hacked his files, tells him that he is in actual fact not the best shot on the team, and the duty of taking out the guards falls to Gloria who has the most amazing eyebrow lift of all time in response. Katie McGrath uses this eyebrow lift ALL THE TIME and I just cannot.
Hello, is this what death feels like?
Gloria, in total BAMF fashion, lines up her shot with the boys looking on, kills the two guards with one shot and steps back with the most amazing smirk on her face while the boys look on in awe – their faces reflecting my own expression.
Je ne regrette rien
One hasty ‘burial’ later, and Fisher and Dmitri are now decked out in military garb to go undercover. After being stealth and avoiding a few guards in a control room, the group split up – Drew and Gloria going upstairs and Fisher and Dmitri going down to the basement. When up in the mid-level, we get to witness Gloria once again saving Drew’s ass with ANOTHER badass move – this time sneaking up on and taking down a guard with her bare hands before Drew can even move a muscle. This is also the part where I was personally attacked by Katie McGrath. After the EPIC takedown, Drew discovers that Teebs is rerouting all the gas into the city which will make it blow up. Drew’s little hacking escapade did not go unnoticed however, and Teebs alerts Konstantin that someone who is in the building is accessing their mainframe.
Congratulations on your face Katie.
Fisher and Dmitri have not been idle. They have discovered the way to the kitchen, and in an effort to find Konstantin’s forces, stumble across a birthday party including a rather large cake. The birthday boy turns up, and doesn’t get the surprise he was expecting, instead he finds all 20 men in the room dead thanks to a trigger happy Fisher, and he runs to set off the alarm that there are intruders. The alarm clears out the control room and Teebs, who is being watched by WORST GIRLFRIEND EVER Bes, overrides the system and leaks the gas in to the city. Gloria and Drew have made their way outside, and are now cornered by two of Konstantin’s men. One GLORIOUS take down later, and Drew runs off to get the key from Teebs.
I could watch this on an endless loop for all eternity!
Drew confronts Teebs, who pulls out a switch blade like he is part of West Side Story and swings it at Drew. Drew, who has his gun out but doesn’t know how to use it, misfires it straight in to Teebs’ shoulder, causing him to drop the key and run off like a little bitch. With the key now destroyed, the team defy orders to clear out and stay to shut the system down. Dmitri and Fisher are left to create a distraction, which involves guns, a couple of grenades, and a few tanks. Gloria and Drew, after making their way to the control room, have the task of hot wiring the controls and connecting the computer to them. Bes decides to make a come back by sneaking past Fisher, and Gloria leaves to take care of her.
Gloria, after finding Bes, pulls out all the smirks and places her gun back in her leg holster and takes it off, ready to go in for hand to hand combat. There is so much badassery here, and I wish that we didn’t have any cuts away to Fisher and Dmitri with their distraction (I am all for strong female characters and I even have the shirt to prove it). However, the cut does provide a bit of comedic relief, and we finally get to see the bazooka! Dmitri comes through for us and takes out a tank, saving Fisher in the process. The final tank with Konstantin in it comes round the corner, and Fisher finally gets to play with his new toy! Too bad he doesn’t know how to use it, and fires the shell straight in to Dmitri’s rust bucket of a car.
Gloria, still fighting Bes, loses sight of her and goes outside to find her, and find her she does. This next sequence will be shown on my grave stone as being my cause of death, like for real. The smirks, the action, the fighting. This scene has it all! I really wish I could GIF the whole scene well I could, I have done it before, but I wont. Bes has a knife hidden in her, and it is up to Gloria to hold her off while Drew almost blows up the plant and Fisher and Dmitri kill Konstantin. All of that is side action to the main course – the Gloria and Bes showdown where Katie McGrath goes FULL ON ALEX DANVERS! Everything is just perfect about the takedown from the swiping, to the angles, the hitting, the throwing, the stealing of the knife, the stabbing, the lighting, and to the smirk.
If ever I was to be murdered, I’d happily be murdered by Katie McGrath
Now that the city is saved, ‘Pantheon’ destroyed, and Katie McGrath as Gloria (and just in general) proved to be the BAMFIEST BAMF of them all, its time to revisit that cake that the poor birthday boy never got to enjoy. What a day to die, on your 23rd birthday by way of a grenade.
One month later, and Drew is now officially an agent at the CIA, and our team are now no longer classed as ‘Throwaways’, Drew is now wearing a suit jacket, Dmitri has a new car (just a less beat up version of the one he already had), looks the same as always, and Gloria finally gets to go on missions wearing something other than a dress.
Like I said at the start, I found this movie because I am a total Katie McGrath Fangirl. There is absolutely no shame in admitting that, I mean on twitter there is now a faction called ‘Lenasexuals’, who are fans of Supergirl who are completely in love with Katie McGrath, as well as a twitter dedicated to comparing Katie McGrath as deserts (yes I obviously follow them). Now that I have watched the movie a couple of times, I do love it for its humor. I mean we have the clichéd computer geek who hates social interaction, the sleazy car guy who is obsessed with his looks and runs off at the first sign of trouble, the tough guy who is seen as being too hot-headed who rushes in to every situation (and in the end prevents someone from doing the same and tells them to be smart about the situation) and the woman whose talents are not appreciated because of her looks. This spy movie takes its characters, and takes them on a journey where they are forced to prove their own worth, not only to the agency they work for, but to prove it to themselves.
I do have one final GIF for you all before I finish up. I did warn you that there would be a LOT of Katie McGrath GIF’s and Fangirling in this one.
The Throwaways is currently streaming on Crackle
Written by Christine
fangirlden.com 