Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/8/07
Americans have a love-hate
relationship with guns, and it's reflected in our movies. They're
engines of death and destruction, and we certainly don't want them in the
hands of our enemies, or even people we don't like. But yet, they're
just so darn cool! Pull that trigger and BAM! Instant Manhood.
Personally I've never had a problem being anti-gun in the real world and
liking my movies as bullet-ridden as possible, and there's no question
Michael Davis's new movie Shoot 'Em Up is with me. The demented,
ultra-violent and gleefully crass movie does its' damnedest to examine
our real and fictional love affair with firearms from every angle, and
while I don't think it ever really comes together as a movie, it contains
a couple top-shelf characters and does know how to make lethal violence
fun.
A lone man we'll later know
as Smith (Clive Owen) sits on a bench chewing on a carrot. A frantic
pregnant woman (Ramona Pringle) rushes by, followed by gun-toting goons
who clearly want her dead. What's Smith to do? He kills one
of them with his carrot, picks up the guy's gun and starts shooting.
He delivers the baby himself, cutting the umbilical cord with a bullet,
but the woman is later killed, leaving Smith to race off with the baby
in hand. This leaves Hertz (Paul Giamatti), the goons' boss, with
a problem: he REALLY needs to kill that baby to satisfy his mystery
employer. Smith tries to pass the baby off to a prostitute (Monica
Bellucci) of his acquaintance, but soon enough all three are on the run
as Hertz calls on more and more goons, Smith mows them down with more and
more creativity, and the powerful people invested in Baby Oliver's future
(or lack thereof) are revealed.
We never learn much about
Smith (Hertz floats some theories, but they're never confirmed), but we
know this much: the man knows how to kill. I don't know if
I've ever seen such a skillfully mounted ballet of diving, sliding, ricocheting,
remote-controlled, airborne and vegetable-aided homicide. Another
thing we learn is that he's easily annoyed. Again and again he follows
the words “You know what I hate?” with a violent solution to little annoyances
like drivers who don't signal and drinkers who make slurping noises.
Owen's brand of world-weary cool is utterly perfect for the role, and I
never doubted for a second that he was every bit as lethal and disgruntled
as advertised. As the yin to his yang, Giamatti turns his trademark
intelligence to evil as the kind of man who takes great pride in the way
his skill at anticipating others' actions made him a killer Rock, Paper,
Scissors player in school. His Hertz is just as homicidally inclined
as Smith, but without the honor or the superhuman skill. But unlike
Smith, he has a high old time plying his diabolical trade. If only
his wife didn't keep calling...
Davis stages his relentless
violence to perfection, never visibly covering things up with quick cutting
or CGI. He also knows how to make overkill funny. You'd think
you'd have to be a budding psychopath to find this much brutality hilarious,
but if you push the envelope of what's possible and make Smith just 1%
more superhuman than you could even imagine, it's just flat-out funny,
and I laughed quite a bit as Shoot 'Em Up's body count mounted.
Similarly demented is its' cartoonish non-abuse of Baby Oliver, who's tossed,
dropped, carried and passed through all manner of carnage and never seems
to mind. The kid is often clearly a doll or special effect, and Davis
is smart enough to turn that into a laugh late in the game.
Alas, he also feels the need
to push the envelope just as far in other areas, and his film wears an
unpleasantly crass smarminess as a badge of honor. I could go at
least a few years without even hearing the words “lactating hooker” in
a movie again let alone having them be a plot point, and I'd rather see
a hundred guys take point-blank bullets to the head than see a newspaper-turned
used diaper get turned inside-out so we can look at an important photo
obscured by feces (why? Because I'm a guy and we're much more comfortable
with fatal violence than baby poop, dammit!).
And while the dueling political/industrial
conspiracies that are ultimately revealed are interesting (just the notion
of more than one competing conspiracy is pretty unique), I'm not sure I
really buy the anti-gun message the movie's trying to sell. Just
down the hall at your local multiplex, Death
Sentence is doing a sensational job showing both the action movie grandeur
of gun violence and its' moral toll, while Shoot 'Em Up piles on
the grandeur but only offers someone telling a story that may or may not
be true on the other side. The film takes a “preaching to the converted”
tact that we all already know gun control is important and right, and I
don't think it realizes how few of The Converted will be buying a ticket
to this sort of flick. It does score some good points against the
hypocrisy of modern politics, though (points that couldn't have been scored
without the very un-Hollywood guts to make one of the bad guys a Democrat),
and offers a couple great quotes on the subject that I'm filing away for
future use.
Also problematic is the Smith/Donna
romance: Bellucci seems unaware of the kind of movie she's in, and
can't find the satirical edge on her silly dialog. I'm not sure this
is entirely her fault, since movies are often hesitant to let the girls
in on this kind of fun, but either way she and Owen don't strike any real
sparks and I didn't find myself caring about their relationship.
In general, the plot failed to engage me as I simply enjoyed careening
from one shootout to the next.
And that's OK. Shoot
'Em Up is so fast, so funny and so wonderfully violent that it can
entertain even those who couldn't care less about the people or the plot.
I wish it would have been deeper, more thematically sound and less eager
to rub my nose in fetishes and poop. But in the end, it all goes
back to the guns. In the hands of fictional movie characters, there's
nothing cooler than a well-handled weapon. Don't try this at home. |
