Shoot ‘Em Up
I get it. I mean, I get the idea. Shoot ‘Em Up is a purposefully over-the-top video game level fantasy of gunplay, wacky action moves, and intentional winking. I was ready and primed for something with the crazy feel of the Transporter or old Tarantino or something like that. The experience I had watching Shoot ‘Em Up was akin to watching latter-day Saturday Night Live: I could tell what they meant to be going for, I knew moment X was intentionally absurd or ridiculous, but the comedy just fell flat flat flat.
Clive Owen is a nameless personage (called Smith) who gets pulled into an insane web of intrigue involving baby farms, guns, and bad people. He is, for lack of any other figure, the hero of the story. Paul Giamatti, or rather the character Hertz, apparently played by a fat guy wearing a Paul Giamatti mask, is our villain. Hertz did not provide the quality relief that having the name Giamatti in the cast normally promises. There is no other logical explanation but that our leads are being played by imposters.
Without spoiling things, it’s almost impossible to discuss the high-camp, low-entertainment combination present here. Let’s just say we have a newborn baby, a lactating hooker, and an infinite supply of bullets and carrots and string to keep the story going. The opening sequence, with bullets flying so thick the thugs could only have been firing offscreen to reload, was promising - we have sliding escapes on oil slicks, a ridiculous birthing scene, and plenty of overdone wackiness. Then the “plot” kicks in and the movie can’t decide if it wasn’t to be hard-boiled or gritty or cartoonish or just kind of awfully gratuitous/insulting. I think if it had stuck to the things that almost worked (a chase scene through the air, a Coen brothers-esque baby rescue, or just 200,000,000 guns) it might have been more enjoyable.
I mean, truly, if this were a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker film, everything would have been better justified. The title does deliver on its promise - there is constant and perpetual gunplay, uninterrupted by anything, not dialogue, not sex, not hand injuries, not childbirth. If that floats your boat (and I have heard reports of this movie doing so) then go knock yourself out. I’ll tape SNL for you too so you can keep losing brain cells when you get done with Shoot Em Up.
For me, while I have historically enjoyed these kinds of movies for the jibes that they are, I just could not get past the overblown, overdone “irony” or arbitrary leaps of logic. I know this is a cartoon, but hyper-realism is more effective when there’s some basis of realism or we are taken to a hyper-real world. The characters spend a LOT of time talking us through segues and justifications and explanations and then boom bang bang we’re back to the shooting, what a relief. Ancillary thugs (all dressed alike, which did make me laugh) walk on with television-commercial-level detailed exposition in everything they say. You know, how you don’t say, “let’s take my car,” you say, “let’s drive in my New Ford Alpine Sierra Jack Bauer Edition with Anti-Lock Doors?”
The main characters are saddled with quirks for quirks’ sake, and the burden of coming up with some kind of sexy, charismatic nemesis-type relationship merely based on proximity. There were, like with SNL, fleeting moments of where this movie worked just fine, or was so absurd that even if it wasn’t intrinsically funny it was still enjoyable for the audacity of the attempt. I particularly enjoyed a little over-reaction road-rage on Clive Owen’s part. Mostly, however, Shoot ‘Em Up was a self-aware yet mindless barrage of “how cool would this be if it had been in a good movie” moments strung together by a kid’s improv troupe plot.
Writer/director Michael Davis (see imdb.com for his other work if you dare) had better go get a job from Lorne Michaels, otherwise we won’t get to maintain his boat payments. If this movie had been presented as a movie written by Hot Fuzz’s character Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), maybe that handicap could have taken it over the edge for me. . I really did want to like it. I know lots of people still did, and power to you. But I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone.
MPAA Rating R-pervasive bloody violence, sexuality, some language
Release date 9/7/07
Time in minutes 93
Director Michael Davis
Studio New Line Studios
