Movie Review: Shoot ‘em Up

By Colin MacLean Sep 7, 2007, 14:37 GMT

"Shoot-Em-Up" is said to be a violent action movie about a man protecting a newborn baby from criminals out to kill the child. Some of the scenes include a gun a battle during a sex romp and another in a freefall. ...more

The movie is in the title.

Shoot ‘em Up is a mindless, uber-violent blood bath out of the TarrentinoJohn Woo school of kinetic filmmaking.

Star Clive Owen barely had time to get out of his fusty clothes and grim persona in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men before he’s suited up and suitably haggard in another film where he spends much of the movie trying to save the life of a newborn child.

Owen is Smith, a Bourne type killing machine and a crack shot.

How good a shot is he?

Well, in the first few minutes he performs immediate post-natal surgery with a well-placed bullet.

We first meet Smith as he sits at a bus stop eating a carrot. A pregnant lady staggers by pursued by a scowling hit man. A gunless Smith puts his trusty carrot to lethal use (as he does several times throughout the film). He’s too late for the lady who takes a hit but he delivers and then saves the child.

Smith finds himself relentlessly pursued by an army of hit men for hire led by the black hearted mercenary, Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti).

For some reason, they want the baby dead.

He enlists the help of D.Q., a lactating prostitute (Monica Bellucci), to keep the crying baby fed and the two go on the run.

Shoot ‘em Up is the kind of film where the hero blasts away with knife edge precision while the armies of bad guys couldn’t hit a barn if they were inside it. At one point he dispatches (by actual count) fifty of them. Much of the shooting is done while he is carrying the baby.

In one scene, while our hero is having it off with the pliable D.Q., he gallantly allows her to finish off the act while he is blasting away at the baddies who have invaded their tryst.

He also gets a library of awful puns after the action set pieces. No doubt left over from old James Bond Movies. She: “Why don’t you just go to the police?” He: “I’m the unibomber.”

Paul Giamatti is the type of bad guy who is so busy shooting his own thugs for screwing up that you wonder how he has any left.

There’s not much to be made of the plot but the audience of young men at whom this movie is aimed aren’t going to care a lot. The film is not about plot but about the sheer visceral pleasure of movement, violence and destruction – all set to a pounding heavy metal score.

There are several extreme torture scenes.

The sardonic Owen is a good actor who, like Matt Damon, is able to express copious emotion through a surly and unsmiling mien. He adds gravitas and credibility to what is otherwise a B movie premise. Giamatti is loud and intractable. Bellucci is lovely and cries delectably on cue.

Wrtierdirector Michael Davis’ action scenes lack the balletic elegance and exhilaration of Woo or Paul Greengrass but he has visual style and knows how to keep the action coming so quickly you may not notice how the film outrages the laws of physics, taste and common sense. 

But after a while, with the ever-mounting death toll reaching the stratosphere and the increasing awareness that no matter what happens Smith is impervious, it all starts to become a bit ho-hum.