by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
Rating: C+ Rated R 117 min
Finally a film that lives up to its title. Indeed, Shoot ‘Em Up is a stunt picture that relies on outrageous gun gags and mindless action with no context or character development. Clive Owen portrays a mysterious Mr. Smith who is sitting on a bench eating a carrot, when suddenly a car comes speeding around a corner out of nowhere. Smith takes a chomp of a carrot. Later Smith drives the carrot through the assassin’s mouth and skull, delivers a baby (whose mother was the target of the assassins) and shoots the umbilical cord off with a bullet. So much for character development.
Paul Giamatti plays Mr. Hertz, a kingpin hitman who has an inexhaustible supply of assassins on his payroll trying to kill this pregnant lady. But that darn Mr. Smith is in the way, so the whole assassin army is after him. Why does Mr. Smith care about the pregnant woman enough to risk his life in a series of harrowing stunts against a legion of bad guys? Just don’t try to figure out why! This is a “shoot ‘em up,” after all, with more ways to fire a gun at another person than anyone thought possible.
Mr. Smith jumps from a bridge and on his way down he shoots out the sunroof of a car and lands in its seat, ala 007. Then in a chase sequence, as he is dueling with another carload of killers, he cleverly uses his car as a weapon to get the drop on the assassins’ car. This goes on ad nauseam. In a garage he lays down on a puddle of oil and slides through the garage firing at the bad guys. On the bright side, some of these stunts are imaginative. Why waste time with dialogue and character development. This film is pure action without the fat.
Ah, a semblance of a plot does emerge. It involves an ailing presidential candidate (Daniel Pilon) who has a scheme to harvest bone marrow from surrogate babies born from artificial insemination. Meanwhile, Hertz sets traps to ensnare Smith and the baby, but Smith thwarts Hertz’s goons at every turn.
Writer/director Michael Davis used John Woo’s Hard Boiled as inspiration for this cartoon fantasy. Of course, what psychopathic madman would put a hit out on a baby. So, the audience is worried about that helpless baby being dragged around by the gun-toting Smith.
Of course, the lame story is skin-deep compared to the incessant gun battles. Even the baby seems to like Smith’s collection of guns and doesn’t cry when Smith is cleaning his weapons. Enough ammo is expended to supply the troops in Iraq for a week. There is a certain dance-like choreography in how Davis orchestrated the gun gags. But when the entire movie is a long gun battle with an inexplicable plot, it gets boring after a while.
Giamatti plays the role of Hertz with tongue-in-cheek verve. He’s tried so hard to win an Oscar and has been beaten out every time. So now he’s into having fun with a role that doesn’t require showcase acting. Clive Owen is darkly macho and grizzled as baby defender Smith.
With so much gun violence in our society, one has to ask, does this picture have any redeeming qualities? It does offer vicarious thrills for people prone to violence and perhaps they will workout their rage in the movie theater rather than out in society. So the bullets fly and the bodies lay in pools of blood. It’s Kill Bill on steroids.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
