There are two things you notice about the action romp Shoot ’Em Up starring Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci and Paul Giamatti. One, it’s got a higher body count than Die Hard 4, Transformers and Bourne Ultimatum combined. Two, none of the carefully orchestrated violence is any more realistic than spending a half hour playing House of the Dead II at your local Timezone.
Shoot ‘Em Up is one big violent joke, an over-the-top rollercoaster vehicle furthering Clive Owen’s onscreen persona as the cool-as-a-cucumber killing machine. Some say it’s the Brit actor’s wry answer to the whole Bond-rejection thing; others point out Owen’s previous turn in the ultra-violent Sin City or the handsomely directed car chase ads he did for BMW.
And did I mention cucumbers? Well, Clive plays the gun-ready Mr. Smith as a carrot-chomping Bugs Bunny on the warpath. Actually, he’s on the run from Mr. Hertz (subtle name, no?), played by Giamatti, a psychopathic point man who wants Smith to return a newborn baby that doesn’t belong to him. You see, just minutes earlier (during the opening sequence), Smith had to deliver this baby — amid a blazing gunfight in a warehouse — after a bunch of bad guys were trying to plug the expectant mother, for some unknown reason.
The killing-bad-guys-while-delivering-a-baby scene is just one of the ways Shoot ‘Em Up aims to break the Over-The-Top-O-Meter — and almost succeeds. Later, there is the hookup with the aforementioned Bellucci, who is still keeping her figure, viewers will be glad to know. After Smith and Bellucci, a prostitute named Donna, team up to save the baby, there’s a wonderful standing-up sex scene during which — you guessed it — bad guys storm through the cheap hotel door, guns blazing, forcing Smith to finish his business with one hand squeezing Bellucci’s derriere and the other squeezing bullets from a semiautomatic at the intruders. Bellucci’s level of concentration in this scene is remarkable, to say the least.
And how many ways can you kill a man? We thought The Bourne Ultimatum rewrote that rule book, but Shoot ‘Em Up — written and directed by first-timer Michael Davis — simply trashes the rules and goes for the most outlandish deaths in screen history. Using a carrot as a lethal weapon, for one, is a tactic never conceived of by the animators over at Warner Brothers. Using the flesh of your own hand as a “gun” to fire embedded bullets is another crazy/clever invention. Then there’s the elaborate Rube Goldberg nest of strings and levers Smith uses to puppeteer a forest of assault rifles into action. Taken together, Shoot ‘Em Up is like watching a Roadrunner cartoon in reverse: the bird has all the Wile E. Coyote tricks necessary to stay alive, while the pursuing predators are dumb, heavily-armed, and extremely poor shots.
There’s some kind of “story” here about unethical baby harvesting and a “message” about gun control, but a movie that allows this many guns to spurt bullets and rip up flesh can’t really even pretend it’s trying to be sensitive to the danger of guns. No, better to simply enjoy the setups, the shoot-ups, and the nonstop thrill of the ride.
Shoot ‘Em Up is derivative of earlier action-thriller masterworks, of course. The whole “cradling the baby while shooting” device is lifted straight from John Woo’s Hard Boiled, while the overkill assault on Smith’s crummy hotel room by about 50 bad guys reminds us of Luc Besson — the pop-minded director of Leon, known outside France as The Professional, in which Jean Reno protects a pre-pubescent Natalie Portman from an army led by Gary Oldman (now, there’s a guy who can chew up scenery).
No slouch himself, Giamatti plays his evil mastermind with large doses of relish, ketchup, mustard and anything else he can find on the hotdog cart. Which is to say, he enjoys playing a baddie: gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes and wielding a hand cannon almost as big as he is. Bellucci is pleasant decoration, a little distracting from the action at times with her deep, deep cleavage line, and she gets to spout some heated Italian, which is always nice to hear, as long as you don’t understand what she’s saying. Clive Owen does nothing beyond the usual here, playing it straight in a cartoon world that’s gone completely gonzo, and chewing off one-liners right after dispatching his villains (“Don’t forget to eat your vegetables”; “So much for seatbelts”; and, of course, “What’s up, Doc?”) that would make even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger groan.
He does get to revel in a role that most males can relate to, at one time or another: “You’re the angriest man on the planet!” Donna shrieks at Smith after he destroys a BMW and its driver who neglected to signal while making a turn. In fact, that could have been the title of this movie — The Angriest Man on the Planet — except Smith doesn’t really seem all that angry; he’s simply pissed off when people do uncivilized things, like parking in handicapped spots when they’re not handicapped, or publicly spanking their children (which Smith reprimands by publicly spanking the mother).
His running line is, “Don’t you just hate it when…?” And you know that some hapless offender of the code of public decency is about to get his or her comeuppance. Such a crusader could work wonders on Metro Manila streets. Di ba?