Reviewer's Bias
Loves: Ridiculous movies Likes: Clive Owens, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci Dislikes: Gore Hates:

There's something very freeing about watching a movie with nearly no redeeming social value. You can simply shut off your brain and experience it on a very primal level, which quickly reveals whether it's entertaining or not. Shoot 'em Up, which should win an award for truth in advertising, is just such a film. There's nothing more to it than a bunch of action scenes strung together on a thin strand of plot, all shot with style and energy. It's as if the creators sat around saying "Wouldn't it be cool if you had a scene with X?" where X is a ridiculously over-the-top set piece out of the John Woo book of filmmaking.

The result is the story of Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), a mysterious loner who gets drawn into a complicated conspiracy when he sees a pregnant woman chased by a thug with a gun. Helping deliver the baby in the midst of a gunfight (the first of several milestones in the movie), he becomes the newborn's protector, against his better judgment, and with the help of DQ (Monica Bellucci,) a prostitute with a unique dairy-based specialty. Why the baby needs protection from the attacks from Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti) and his army of hired killers is revealed as the film unfolds, and it's just as over-the-top as the rest of the film.

Does the baby's backstory really matter? Not really. Will you care? Not really. How could you, when you've got shoot-outs during sessions of lovemaking, shoot-outs while falling out of planes and shoot-outs with people with no fingers. It's indulgent filmmaking at its finest, all conducted with gusto by director Michael Davis, whose previous work wouldn't suggest he's capable of helming such beautiful chaos. But here it is, for us to enjoy, borrowing from old cartoon violence (especially when it comes to Mr. Smith's ever-present carrot and Mr. Hertz' signature ring tone) and the complexity of Rube Goldberg devices (which Mr. Smith can MacGyver in any situation.)

The excessive nature of the film helps make it fun, but the three lead performances make it good, starting with Owen, who further defines his status as an action hero. His look is perfect, making even the most unbelievable maneuver somewhat realistic, and his ability to deliver even the cheesiest dialogue with grim seriousness raises Mr. Smith above the B-movie trappings of the rest of the film. The same doesn't go for Bellucci's milk maiden, but if she was real, she wouldn't be nearly as fun as she is here, since it feels like she got lost on the way to a '60s Italian spy movie. A thick accent, sexy body and halting delivery take her to the edge of cartoon and into the realm of just right for this film.

The same goes for Giamatti, who gets to leave his acting ability at the door and turn on the ham as an angry yet erudite assassin struggling with his family life as he hunts down his infant prey. It's the kind of unhinged performance you need in a genre film, but with a disturbingly dark sense of humor that's frequently missing from such characters, resulting in flat, one-dimensional bad guys. Here, thanks to Giamatti, Mr. Hertz is practically likable, despite being a complete psychopath-the mark of a quality villain.

There's so much going on in this film, that you'll be surprised how long it feels, despite barely cracking the 80-minute mark. That's not to say it drags in any way or that you'll be bored at any point. The film just crams so much into its run-time that it feels like two utterly pointless, yet undeniably enjoyable exercises in violence in one. Considering it's missing about a film's worth of plot, the padding is welcome and just what the doctor ordered.

The Bottom Line
This is the ultimate anti-film-snob movie, lacking most anything resembling substance, but loaded with tons of fun, action and style. If you can just sit back and let the excessive gun battles and violence wash over you like a wave of guilty pleasures, the film is, pardon the pun, a blast... If you want a night of mindless fun and don't mind it coated in a few gallons of blood, this is a great pick to veg out to.

Clive Owen stars as Smith, an enigmatic homeless man with a taste for carrots, who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time when a pregnant woman fleeing for her life runs past him. Unable to sit idly by as a small army of armed killers pursue the shrieking lass, Smith decides to get involved, leading to a brutal shoot-out that never quite pauses, even as Smith helps deliver the baby. Enter Paul Giamatti as Hertz, the cold-blooded leader of the killers pursuing the woman and her freshly-delivered baby and, more importantly, Elmer Fudd to Owen's Bugs Bunny. Hertz even calls Smith a "wascally wabbit," and understanding that Giamatti is Elmer Fudd and Owen is Bugs Bunny is crucial to truly appreciating Shoot 'Em Up.

When the nameless mother catches a stray bullet in the head, Smith is left to his own devices as he takes off running from Hertz. Enlisting the aid of DQ (Monica Bellucci), a hooker with a heart of gold, Smith cuts a bloody swath through a never-ending roster of expendable henchmen as he tries to figure out who wants the baby dead, and why. With every bit of eye-rollingly silly exposition that takes the audience once step closer to figuring out the absurd plot, there thankfully comes another bit of violent action that goes further over the top, surpassing anything served up by other films of this nature. Between the shooting and the killing and the killing and the shooting, the plot reveals a sinister scheme involving a baby factory and a conspiracy theory that is just plain laughable. But that's okay, because you are supposed to laugh--as well as cheer--as Shoot 'Em Up delivers one check-your-brain-at-the-door action sequence after another. Just when you think the you've seen it all as Smith throws a hump into DQ while laying waste to a team of gunmen, you realize that was just foreplay for when Smith gets in a gun battle with another small army, while parachuting from a plane.

Although I was initially disappointed when Clive Owen was not cast as James Bond, his work in films like Shoot 'Em Up and Children of Men are making sure his talents are not going to waste. A role like this in a film like this requires a serious actor who does not take himself too seriously. Owen pulls it off wonderfully, never tipping his hand that this is as much a comedy as it is an action thriller. The real comedy is left to Giamatti, who hams it up and really seems to appreciate the opportunity to play a sadistic villain. Both actors deliver performances that run the risk of being under-appreciated in a film that can easily be distracting.

With the first 15 minutes of Shoot 'Em Up unfolding with the sort of ludicrous action usually reserved solely for Hong Kong cinema, it is hard to believe that the film could go anywhere but down from there. Instead Davis manages to take his film ever-higher, reaching a point of over-the-top that few filmmakers would ever dare approach, for fear that audiences just won't be able to process everything. And while Davis' film never comes close to something like John Woo's seminal Hard Boiled, Shoot 'Em Up is one of the few movies that seems to really understand that particular language of action and violence, creating a cartoonish cavalcade of carnage.

If you are, man oh man, "Shoot" is the perfect little film for you. If you've read the above paragraph and felt the all-too-familiar wave of bad movie nausea, than you're much like me. There's a time for ultra-hip, self-aware, over-the-top pretense, and then there's "Shoot 'Em Up:" a creatively bankrupt aria of stupid ideas stupidly assembled with a desire to register even more stupidly than human intelligence will comprehend. Get it? It's supposed to stupid. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

For the last year or so, director Michael Davis (the man behind such duds as "100 Girls," "Monster Man," and "Eight Days a Week") has been proclaiming his love for action movies, yet "Shoot" is almost a slap in the face of the genre. The film comes from the same cesspool that germinated several other adrenaline-milking features of the last few years, including the excretal "Crank" and the vile "Running Scared." These are snot-slicked creations intended to ride the audience hard with a smug orgy of violence, only to undercut the horror with creamy black comedy so nobody goes home with a grudge. Parody is the lazy man's game, and Davis plays "Shoot" like a guy cashing in his last favors in Hollywood.

Taking Wooesque gunplay theatrics to a "Looney Tunes" level (a reference Davis crudely underlines at every turn), the film is nothing short of an orgasm of banal brutality, with bullets flying, limbs torn off, and babies put in harm's way for cheap effect. Love him or hate him, at least Woo played his cards straight, brazenly walking towards absurdity with a straight face and more squinty conviction than a spelling bee champ. He believed in his mayhem and fought to sustain his funhouse of violence, even when, at times, it was all a little too much. Hell, even caloric escapism like "The Transporter" imagines a loose reality for itself.

Davis isn't nearly that brave, and turns "Shoot" into a reckless wild comedy that scraps even the faintest hint of realism and dignity to become a flashpoint of lunacy; an acidic cartoon for those with a more inebriated sense of humor and tolerance for nincompoop direction. If previous cinematic efforts didn't already covered this ground repeatedly, perhaps "Shoot" wouldn't seem like a death row meal of dry toast and warm water. It craves the Woo seal of approval with wickedly-mounted sequences of bullet-whizzing combat, but it's afraid of facing such bold style head-on, cowardly snickering at itself time and again with a kind of ghastly self-deprecation that would make Kevin Smith wince. The film literally begs the viewer to scoff at the preposterous nature of it all, leaving nothing to root for but a hollow exercise in masturbatory filmmaking. Yay?

Oh, there's a plot somewhere inside "Shoot," but one holds the feeling, as the film steamrolls over anything in its path, that the storyline was an afterthought following the years Davis spent choreographing the action beats. Somehow he tricked Monica Bellucci (Heaven's second greatest gift to the planet) into starring as Mr. Smith's lactating hooker/pal (don't ask), permitted Paul Giamatti to slip into his earsplitting overact zone (an era I thought was finally over with "Sideways"), and looks to sneak a mutated message on gun control inside the exhaustively winky, persistently-crinkled script. That is, when he's not spinelessly backpedaling on the cardboard characters, trying, in the film's only infinitesimal moments of sincerity, to embellish their haunted souls as if anyone is going to give a flying fig how these characters earned their "life stinks" badges. Either you put the time and effort into emotional resonance or you imagine berserk gunfights occurring mid-penetration. There's no room for both.

Of course I realize that by taking the dreadfulness of "Shoot" so personally, I'm playing directly into Davis's sweaty, calloused hands, potentially revealing my critic heart to be black and shriveled when it comes to exclusionary geek-treehouse entertainment such as this. I'll take the risk, since "Shoot" is one smothering, viciously unfunny spanking machine to sit through. Last spring's "Hot Fuzz" tangoed on a similar reverential terrain, mimicking action movies to create an action movie, but it had, gasp, genuine wit to support its homages and parodies. It used, gasp gasp, actual care, concentration, and thought when serving up a hot plate of havoc rooted in established genre entertainment.

The bottom line is: "Hot Fuzz" had skill. "Shoot" has noise and a debilitating reliance on the absurd to power it through scenes of gag repetition (yeah, we get it: Mr. Smith uses carrots as a weapon), high-school-dropout screenwriting, and numbing usage of ironic cock-rock music to stroke off Davis's less perceptive audience members. If there's a Hell, an honest-to-God place of eternal torment, "Shoot 'Em Up" would make the ideal introductory video, promising a lifetime of anguish to come.

For those of you who found The Transporter too subtle*, or if you've decided that The Boondock Saints is the Godfather of the millennial generation, then it's quite possible that you will see in Shoot 'Em Up what I so clearly did not. My thesaurus doesn't have enough synonyms for the word "bad" to adequately get me through this review. I was squirming in agony for just about every frame of this awful, awful movie, and having to relive it just to write this is causing me to shudder the way one normally shudders when imagining having a prostate exam or passing kidney stones.

Here's the skinny: Clive Owen is the hero. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time for living a quiet life, but the right place at the right time when it comes to saving a pregnant woman from thugs that multiply faster than Madrox the Multiple Man. These leather jacket-wearing dudes are lead by the maniacal genius Paul Giamatti, who likes cracking bad jokes in between showing off how smart he is. Clive delivers the woman's baby before she takes one in the head, and manages to get away with the wee bairn in a hail of bullets and impossible stunts.

I was actually ready to go with Shoot 'Em Up at that point, because I kept expecting the fourth wall to break. Surely, this wasn't really the movie I was watching. Clive Owen is playing a bad actor in a bad action movie, and the reveal is just around the corner. Someone's going to shout "Cut!" and like Bugs Bunny, whom he clearly emulates, Clive's going to turn to his audience and say, "Gee, ain't I a stinker?" Right?

Well, kind of. Clive Owen is performing badly in a bad action movie, but it really is Shoot 'Em Up and there is no breaking away from it. Strap in, because it's all downhill.

In order to save this little baby, Clive enlists a lactating hooker played by Monica Bellucci, and Giamatti chases them all over town, moving from one ludicrous situation to another. There is no point dissecting the plot, because it is intended to be ludicrous. I get that. Michael Davis, who directed as well as wrote this garbage fest, even wants us to think he's being clever by constructing multiple gags to let us know he's in on the joke. He's not just making a bad action movie, he's making fun of bad action movies. Shoot 'Em Up is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for people who huff paint, laced with left-over hipster irony that went out of style when those guys realized the elephant ears they stretched their lobes into weren't going to snap back into their original shapes.

The thing is, I'm just not buying what Davis is selling. In order to play at that kind of satire, your movie has to be smart, and Shoot 'Em Up is not smart. It has no class, nor does it have any real wit. It's dumb, dumb, and then dumb some more. What it has instead of brains is a solid rock of meanness. Shoot 'Em Up is a vicious movie, escalating its graphic violence and cruel jokes until the screams of sadism become a cacophony of torture, women debasing themselves (and being debased--how many dead pregnant women is too much?), and dislodged eyeballs. This film is a comedy in the way Hostel II and Captivity were movies about relationships. By the final bloodbath, Clive Owen isn't even trying for groaning one-liners anymore. There's no point. If the movie has done its job, we'll be drowning in our own drool, unable to laugh for all the gasping for air. Hours later, I'm still trying to wash the sickness off of me.

It's not that I'm offended by Shoot 'Em Up. One, I'm not namby pamby enough where I'm offended all that easy. Two, being offensive requires that you also be clever, something I've already noted this movie is not. If I'm anything, I'm insulted that the people involved in putting this atrocity together decided that we should all be so easy to please that they tried so little. Most of the work was done when they put the cast together, and all anyone had to do was deliver on the promise of the title. When it comes down to it, though, the action isn't even that good. Davis constructs several sequences that are like old Jackie Chan routines with a touch of Rube Goldberg, but rather than actually pulling them off with real stunts and complicated set designs, all of the running and jumping gunplay is done with computers and editing trickery. He's robbed us of the visceral thrill he promised us when he named his movie Shoot 'Em Up. I know a lot of people will likely compare this to a video game, but I don't want to blame the poor gamers for this waste of time. Besides, those guys at least know you have to actually be involved in what's happening for it to be fun.

I could go on and on ranting about how much I hated this movie, and probably take up more of your time than you would have to spend watching it for yourself (though, I'll at least not charge you for the dishonor). Instead, I'll leave you with a snippet of one of my favorite film reviews of all time. It's by Harlan Ellison, and I have it in front of me, contained in a book of his film criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching. It's Harlan's take on Robocop**, and he gives that movie many thrusts of his dagger, but the one that has always stuck with me is his labeling it as "wetwork," which he then defines as, "the 'intelligence community's' currently fashionable doublespeak for the dirtiest of deeds, the act of assassination, termination with extreme unction, or whatever."

Such a label could also be applied to Shoot 'Em Up. "Or whatever" indeed. As Harlan told his readers in relation to Robocop, "Stay away from this one at all costs."

* And for the record, I actually enjoyed The Transporter quite a bit. Make of that what you will.

** Also for the record, I pretty much agree with Ellison's feelings on Robocop, though my reaction softened in the twenty years between viewing it at the theatre and on DVD. Maybe in 2027, I'll be okay with Shoot 'Em Up, too.