Shoot 'Em Up: Movie Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

Here is a good example of what happens if you were favored to be the next James Bond, but then were overlooked for the role.

If you're Clive Owen, for example, who must have a subversive sense of humor, you show up to star in a movie that features as much ingenious action as you'd find in a Bond film, but without the good taste, the good manners and the swank locales that tend to inspire daydreams of extended travel abroad.

Nothing in writer and director Michael Davis' "Shoot 'Em Up" will prompt such longings because nothing here is as intoxicatingly beautiful as, say, Montenegro was in "Casino Royale." Instead, there's only the filth of a crime underbelly that's somewhat eye-opening in just how base that underbelly can be.

This swift, rank, enjoyably dark movie presses against so many limits, it achieves the threshold of a new limit. It likely will offend plenty, but most of those folks won't be in on the joke the movie courts. With its tongue planted firmly in cheek, "Shoot 'Em Up" has its gut in grindhouse, though with superior production values and a somewhat larger budget. It's a live-action cartoon, a fact Davis underscores throughout since he employs carrots so often as instruments of death.

The film stars Owen as Mr. Smith, who is minding his business one day eating a carrot when along comes a pregnant woman rushing past him in a state of duress.
Following her is a tough with a gun who obviously has plans to kill her. Since for Smith this won't do, he intervenes, which leads to a dramatic series of events that finds the woman giving birth while gun-wielding assailants assail them both.

Let's just say it's a memorable scene (you don't want to know how Smith cuts the umbilical cord), but when one of the stray bullets strikes the woman dead in the forehead, Smith is left at a crossroads. Should this gruff loaner leave the child to die, or should he scoop it up and be saddled with it for the rest of the movie?

Naturally, he does the latter, which proves significant for a few reasons, the main one being that plenty of people want to get their hands on that baby, chief among them the hit man Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Just why won't be revealed here--it would spoil a plot that already is dangerously thin--but safe to say that political reasons are involved, as they tend to be these days.

With Monica Bellucci as the lactating hooker who leaves her fetish-hungry clients to join Smith so she can feed the baby (and smolder with Smith in a romantic subplot), the movie bulldozes forward. It's only 82-minutes long, but it's filled with so many raw, infectious gun fights, it comfortably earns its title as it cuts its bloody swath across the screen.

Watching the movie, it's safe to assume that rarely, if ever, has a newborn child, fake or not, been used in ways that it's used here. What ensues will horrify some, but since "Shoot 'Em Up" is designed with a core audience in mind--Tarantino junkies--it succeeds in serving that audience and likely will delight them with a toxic thrill.

Grade: B


Technorati tags:
movie reviewsmoviesfilmfilm reviews