Cranky’s Flickershow Reviews

By Neil Richter

Execute your disbelief…

…Preferably with a hollowpoint—make that half a dozen hollowpoints. No, make that half a dozen hollowpoints fired from the modified barrel of an Uzi/missile launcher combo mounted onto the grille of a humvee. This is Shoot ‘Em Up, possibly the most purely honest movie I have ever seen. Yes, honest. Not thrilling or sexy or funny or enlightening, just honest. You see, Shoot ‘Em Up promises the audience a feature length running gun-battle with some wisecracks, a baby, and possibly a sex scene or two thrown in for good measure. Well, that’s exactly what they get. This may seem like faint praise, but in an era where films continually fail to live up to overblown advance praise or trailers that give away all the best parts, it’s a bit astonishing to watch a film which sets a certain standard for itself, then plugs away until it reaches its goal before ending with a self-satisfied nudge and a wink. Many filmmakers could learn a lesson from director Michael Davis’ creation. I find it necessary to defend this film’s small but ironclad virtues for two reasons. The first is that a lot of people out there are going to watch it and be disgusted. The second is that the film flopped its first weekend out of the gate (understandably) and I’m really pulling for it to reach its audience on video.

Lets address the first issue with a simple statement: If this film offends you, then you shouldn’t have walked into a movie called Shoot ‘Em Up in the first place. Blame yourself, not the film. Mr. Bean’s Holiday is playing across the hall; maybe you’ll get a kick out of that. Shoot ‘Em Up is enormously offensive in about a dozen different ways, but the beauty is in the fact that Davis has announced his intentions of making a hard-core movie for hard-core action fans. His audience doesn’t care about the lactating hookers, or the casual brutality, or the reckless disregard for the safety of an infant, not to mention the rampant misogyny. It all goes with the territory. This isn’t another Live Free or Die Hard, neutered with a pg-13 rating despite the fact that the Die Hard franchise is based around a word that you’re simply not aloud to say in a pg-13 film (give you a hint: Yippie Ki-Yay…). This is the kind of grisly action film they used to churn out back in the 80’s and early 90’s, only with more violence and a refreshing self-awareness. This is a film that has a pretty good idea just how stupid it really is, and revels in it. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Plenty of people do, and occasionally I’m one of them. We’re not crazy and we’re not pushed to do bad things by watching naughty films. We don’t take this stuff seriously. It’s just that sometimes nothing hits the spot like the simple pleasures of a Hollywood gunbattle. Thus concludes my rant against those who blame this film for being ‘amoral’ or ‘irresponsible’

Onto my second point: Of course it flopped. A film that tips the scales so far in one direction, to sacrifice plot, character development, even simple logic in the pursuit of its own bullet-riddled place in filmdom is bound to appeal to the narrowest margins. I will tell you straight out: in many ways it is simply not a good film. The script is godawful. The one-liners even worse. Every actor except the two leads is completely wasted. Even the action at times seems standard. But dammit, I can’t bring myself to hate a film that features a shootout taking place in the middle of a skydive, and I’m sure there are a lot of you out there who would pay money to see such a thing. There are a lot of us that enjoy movies that are big, dumb, and violent every now and then. Shoot ‘Em Up is perhaps one of the purest fixes for this craving that I have ever witnessed. Thus, it has a place at the table. All I want to do is pull the chair out for it.

Yes, the two leads are probably the only reason normal mainstream filmgoers would find themselves viewing something like Shoot ‘Em Up. Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti commit themselves fully to this lunatic enterprise. Giamatti in particular shines as a villain who can only be described as a perverse live-action version of Elmer Fudd. He’s almost unfathomably evil and I love him all the more for it. For his role, Clive Owen turns his back on all the praise he has received for ‘proper’ films like Children of Men and Closer as the carrot chomping hero (catching a motif here?) who manages to kill an army of henchman while doing the following activities: running, jumping, skydiving, having sex, driving, stumbling around with broken digits, and snacking on carrots. Now that’s multitasking. Together, they form something approaching the beating heart of this exercise in absolute mayhem.

To my action film-fan brothers, this is the movie for you. To everyone else, stay far far away from this one.

09/20/07