"What do you think of the Second Amendment now?" - 'Shoot 'Em Up' Review...
I think there are two directions that a movie with a title and cover box like Shoot 'Em Up ca go. It could try to be a hard boiled, gritty action movie and come off as something horribly clichéd and trite, like a cheesy Van Damme or Seagal b-movie (which have their own style of charm because of the actors involved), or it could overblow everything and come off as a fun action romp with little logic and even less need for it. Shoot 'Em Up goes for the second one, and it swings for the fences. It's like Baby's Day Out. With guns.Clive Owen stars as the Good Guy and Paul Giamatti stars as the Bad Guy, and there's really not a lot of characterization beyond that, despite the fact that a clear attempt is made at making him a three dimensional character as we occasionally see during exasperated calls from his nagging wife that, despite all his movie-villain tendencies, he's still just a normal guy. And of course, he gets some classic lines ("Violence is one of the most fun things to watch!").
Owen's character, interestingly named Smith (what else do we need?), is also pretty thin. All we ever learn about him is that he knows a hell of a lot about guns and can't stand it when people litter, don't use turn signals, or spank their kids. This is the perfect man for a movie like this.
He's like a fountain of retribution when he needs to be, but because he hates all the right things (and even has a soft spot for dogs, like all normal people), he can effectively deliver clever pearls of advice ("Eggs have no business dancing with stones.").The plot is tenuous to the point of meaninglessness. Smith is sitting on a bus stop bench casually eating a carrot by himself one night when a hysterical pregnant woman stumbles past, soon followed by a raving lunatic screaming that he's going to kill her. With an annoyed sigh, Smith gets up and marches after the man, as though once again having to reprimand a misbehaving child. Before long, he's holding a baby and cuts the umbilical cord by shooting it with his gun, and by now it's unmistakable what kind of movie this is.
If you're not having fun by this point, you're probably not going to enjoy the movie. Everything in it is so overblown that it literally is hilarious, but Owen and Giamatti make the material work so well that it's one of the most watchable movies I've seen in quite a while. It also features what is possibly the most active role that a vegetable has ever played in an action film.
[caption id="attachment_25585" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Yes, those are baby bottles..."]
[/caption]Skydiving is one of the things that is almost never done right in the movies (hear that, Wesley Snipes?), but because it fits so well with the rest of the movie, the skydiving scene at the end of Shoot 'Em Up is outstanding, and doesn't look out of place at all. The movie is funny and exciting, and is brutally violent without being disturbing, because it's comic book violence.
It may not be well received by much of the audience, for a myriad of reasons. It does, for example, have a pretty clear mistrust for politicians, especially ones involved in war. In today's political climate in America, I can see a lot of the supporters of Bush and the war in Iraq being unimpressed with a film that so cleverly criticizes such foreign policy – "Never trust the people who stand to profit, plain and simple. They're the bad guys."
The rest of us, however, are going to love it…
[caption id="attachment_25590" align="aligncenter" width="299" caption="4 Beans out of 5."]
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