Shoot 'Em Up

***

by Scott Cupper
10/15/07

Smith…………………….Clive Owen
Hertz…………………….Paul Giamatti
Donna Quintano…………Monica Bellucci
Baby Oliver……………..Sidney Mende-Gibson
Lucas Mende-Gibson
Kaylyn Yellolees

Written & Directed by Michael Davis

Rated R
Runtime: 1 hr 26 min

Sorry I've been out of commission. Been busy. Hopefully will get back into the swing and actually see a movie this week. Reviews for The Brave One and Eastern Promises will be coming shortly.

In life, there’s what I call the Rule of Three. It goes like this: you are presented with Item A. You have an initial reaction to Item A. Then you become bored with Item A because it’s there. Then you go back and look closer at Item A because it’s still there. This phenomenon is most often encountered on TV shows filmed before a live studio audience. Say an actor lands a good joke well. First comes the initial laugh. The actors wait. The laugh dies down. The actors still wait. That’s when the second wave of laughter comes in.

I feel like we’ve reached this point with certain genres: Westerns, action movies, horror movies. We’ve seen the originals; we’ve seen the rehashes. Now we’re at the reimagining. A more learned review would probably define this as post-modernism. Bah.

This can be handled in many ways. A prime example is Scream, which simply pointed out the clichés. Others choose the punk approach, boiling the genre down to its core components. Unforgiven added psychological complexity to the Western. And others simply blow the doors off of what we’ve seen before. Shoot ‘Em Up, the best-titled movie of the year, chooses this approach.

Consider Donna Quintano, the female character. Is she there for any other reason than there are always sexy women in an action movie? And she is played by whom? Monica Bellucci, the woman you get because Marilyn Monroe is dead, Sophia Loren is old, and Salma Hayek is pregnant. And if you see the movie, think about her profession and, er, special talent. Might the director be making a commentary about the relationship between these characters and the audience?

All this is serious stuff about a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously at any point. Consider that the opening fight contains a shot of spent shells bouncing off a pregnant tummy.

Before we meet the pregnant girl, however, we are presented with one of the great faces of modern cinema: Clive Owen. Yes, ladies, I understand that’s he’s fun to look at, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Certain people have faces that tell you a story without the owners even uttering a word. Bogart comes to mind. And now we have Clive Owen.

We first see Clive (playing a character only known as Smith) in close-up, chomping on a carrot. A woman (possessor of the aforementioned pregnant tummy) walks past him clutching said tummy, screaming in pain, into the alley. Clive chomps on his carrot because life is hard. A man crashes a car, screams misogynistic jingles after the woman, and follows her down the alley. Clive, hoping that the burden of life doesn’t kill him, rises.

And so Shoot ‘Em Up begins and doesn’t stop. There’s a plot and it might actually be a commentary on America’s love of guns, but every time I tried to figure it out, people started shooting guns. The complexity might be a commentary on plot itself, but there I go again.

The movie mixes gunplay into every aspect of life. Yes, even childbirth. And of course, death. But what makes this movie so much fun is how it relishes the gunplay. Every time you think they’ve topped themselves, they top themselves. In everything: choreogrphy, violence, imgination. I’m thinking back over the movie, trying to figure out which sequence to mention, but I don’t want to ruin any. So, if this sounds like fun, go see it.

I should mention the other players. Paul Giamatti is there as the villain, Hertz, and relishes his role. It’s nice to see great actors simply having fun. I believe that most actors get into acting because they want to handle a gun in a big action movie. I think Giamatti’s earned this bit of fun, don’t you? The other performance of note is Oliver, (the baby from that tummy) played by three babies. He often gets laughs simply because he’s there. If only all comedic acting were that easy.

I had a great time at this movie. Some of the actual jokes don’t land quite where they should like most of the bullets fired in the movie, but I appreciated director Michael Davis’s imagination who animated his storyboards to show people what he wanted this movie to do. If you’re tired of overbloated Jerry Bruckheimer productions (Pirates of the Caribbean anyone?), this is the perfect antidote.