Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07
Keep on with the guns don’t stop, don’t stop ‘till you Shoot ‘Em Up
With Shoot ‘Em Up, Michael Davis has made something so unrestrainedly, fantastically, gloriously stupid, he almost convinces you stupidity is a form of high art, a fleeting, almost impossible-to-capture style as difficult as neorealism or well-pitched melodrama. To say that Davis revels in the orgiastic gunfights he fills Shoot ‘Em Up with seems unfair: he has such an obvious devotion to watching men get target-practiced that to call him anything less than an auteur of some of the finest/funniest gunplay ever put to screen. (And really, if we’re going to celebrate the lavish sword/kickfests that regularly come out of Asia, why not the grinning, decidedly American gun fetish here?) Clive Owen is more or less perfectly cast as the reluctant hero Mr Smith, but even his considerable talent as a gravel-faced do-gooder is more or less superfluous here. Paul Giamatti is actually surprisingly adept as the sleazeball out to kill him, but again, Davis is more concerned with the gun he’s carrying than how he’s carrying it. Oh, there’s also some semblance of a plot—a conspiracy involving pregnant women, a US Senator and, naturally, gun control—but when your international star headliners are taking a backseat to bullets, you can only imagine how integral that is to actual movie: it’s used entirely to move from set piece to set piece, point A to point blank.
But man, what a bunch of incredible set pieces. Smith delivers a baby while shooting off an unnamed gang of thugs. He kills a man with a carrot—twice. He cuts a man’s hand off just to use his thumbprint-specific gun. He has a gunfight in mid-air after jumping out of an airplane, angling someone towards a helicopter. He shoots people to Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”; he shoots people to Nirvana’s “Breed.” Hell, he saves the life of a baby by shoot-starting a playground merry-go-round: if you’re going to go ahead and make the gun your star, you might as well get it to do shit like this.
So, yes, Shoot ‘Em Up is ridiculously stupid. It’s called Shoot ‘Em Up, though, for the love of god: they had damn well better shoot things up, and do it with style. V
Now Playing
Shoot ‘Em Up
Written and Directed by Michael Davis
Starring Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti,
Monica Bellucci, Stephen McHattie
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