Shoot'em Up

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Summary:
A guy sitting on a bench waiting for the bus sees a pregnant woman about to be shot by some dude. So, he goes to help her out, the baby is born during a shootout and he's being pursued by dozens upon dozens of guys trying to kill the baby. He has to dispatch all these dudes in unrealistic Blazing Guns of Fury!!

Review:
With a title like Shoot'em Up, I don't see how anyone would expect anything more than guns blasting, and people getting shot and mutilated in countless measures of imaginative and violent glory. Make Clive Owen the perpetrator of said violence, and I'm in that movie seat with a bag of buttered popcorn and an overpriced gumungous bucket of soda pop! I wasn't expecting much of a story, and certainly wasn't expecting any semblance of realism. I was just looking for a good time. Shoot'em Up certainly works hard at starting off with action, filling the parts after that and before the very end with action, and then having the credits roll after another bit of action. Somewhere in that mix of unending mayhem are ways in which they could throw in a lactating prostitute, sex AND gunfights at once, offensively gory carnage and/or audaciously extreme attempts at grossing the audience out. But with a laugh.
I was in the right mood for just such a movie, and although it's no Crank, it certainly belongs in that same kind of action movie category. Clive Owen is always the cool cat, even if he is kind of a wimp in Derailed, but even then I knew that if he wanted to at any time just bring on the hurt, NO ONE could have stood in his way! This time, he has plenty of opportunity to put the hurtin' on anyone and everyone within gunshot range. The only people who don't seem to fall victim to his carrot attacks (more on that later) and gunblasts are the baby he saves, and the sexy Monica Bellucci, who is the whore that ends up falling unwittingly into his adventure.
For some reason, Smith (Owen) has an obsession with carrots. In the opening scene, a guy has a gun pointed on him, and he smoothly takes a deliberate bite from his carrot. Then, he rams it into the dude's mouth, says "be sure to eat your vegetables" and shoves it through his throat and out the back of his head. That's only the beginning of his apparent love for vegetables. He seems to have an arsenal of carrots beneath the flaps of his leather jacket, because he ends up taking a bite out of one and using it in the most unorthodox of manners throughout the entire movie. I don't mind this new and innovative trademark for an action hero. It's original, gotta hand them that.
Seeing Paul Giamatti toting around guns and ammo, and being an actual threat to Owen kinda makes me laugh. It's ridiculous, yes, but what part of this movie isn't ridiculous? It actually kinda turns out alright in the end, seeing Hertz gettin' the hurtin' put on him and his underlings. On another note, I do have a complaint about a skydiving scene. Smith jumps out of a moving airplane and is pursued by about 12 other skidivers with guns, resulting in a shootout in the sky that reminds me of a skydiving shootout sequence in the game No One Lives Forever. I thought the green screen work was too blurry and choppy. I couldn't see much of what was going on, and it was about as hard to watch as Transporter 2's crashing plane sequence. I love the IDEA of the action scene, just wish it was prepared a little better on screen is all.
It's really tough to please me when it comes to action movies like this. Most of the time, the action is so far over the top that it goes beyond the movie's set level of expectations. Within the first 20 minutes of the movie, there should be one of the movie's most outrageous stunts, therefore setting the bar and explaining to the viewers what limits the movie has. If you go a little beyond that, it's ok, especially if that bar was set really really high in the beginning. The other major annoyance I have with movies like this is when it is so painfully stupid that even laughing at it becomes a chore. The final major rule is that if a movie IS this far out and silly, then make sure you let the audience know that YOU AREN'T SERIOUS.
Shoot'em Up does it's fair share of telling us that we aren't supposed to take it seriously. Good call. In the opening scene, well... EVERYTHING that Smith does is impossible and obviously only done to entertain, so the level of disbelief has been set real real high. In terms of its stupidity, the biggest flaw is with bad one liners that don't work well, ("Talk about blowing your load." Lame.) but when it came to the paper-thin plot and the performances themselves, it was done well enough to appease me. The funniest scenes were when he gets a moment of road rage (but it could have been done a little better), and one of my most favorite spanking scenes in a movie EVER.

From the title alone, Shoot'em Up should let you know if this is the kind of movie that you want to see. If that's not enough, then if you love massive amounts of carnage, lots of tasteless offensive humor that tries to insult every part of the audience at one time or another, and combine this with a love of Clive Owen, then there's a really really decent chance that you'll have a fun time with this one. I liked it well enough, but for some reason there was something missing to keep me from falling in love with it. I had fun, laughed a little, enjoyed some of the silly acrobatics and impossible stunts, but wasn't blown out of my seat.

GRADE: B-

Reviewed: 9/10/07