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Printer-Friendly ModeOwen delivers carrots, carnage
September 10, 2007 —
What a weird movie. Shoot 'Em Up is a nonstop rollercoaster ride of guns, guns, and, well, guns, starring Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, of all people. I remember being baffled upon seeing a poster for this movie a couple of weeks ago, and I left the theater no less baffled. Baffled, but entertained.
This movie opens with a scene that includes misogyny, childbirth, dozens of shootings, Clive Owen sliding across a floor on engine oil, and murder via carrot (yes, carrot), all in the span of about eight minutes. It concludes with a masterful sequence featuring Owen and Giamatti shooting out billboard letters to spell out four-letter words to each other. If this sounds remotely entertaining, it's the movie for you. If it sounds disgusting and in poor taste, it's probably still worth seeing, as no amount of words can really portray the madness of what transpires throughout Shoot 'Em Up's runtime.
The plot, which is set up in the opening sequence amidst the flying bullets, revolves around Owen's character, Smith, trying to save the baby that has been born, and Giamatti's character, Hertz trying to kill it. The satire is thick, with Smith strutting through the movie as the efficient but heroic killer with a dark past, all the while munching on carrots, Bugs Bunny style.
What keeps this movie afloat is that it's obviously aware of its own stupidity, yet still makes itself passable as an action movie. Maybe it doesn't sound funny in print, but the absurdity of many of the scenes in Shoot 'Em Up are hilarious. Not since Running Scared have I seen a mainstream movie that is so berserk (I'm intentionally not counting Crank, which was piggybacking off of Running Scared and tried way too hard for its own good).
At one point a crony employed by Hertz asks him if he knows just how many of their men Smith has killed, and I was really hoping he would actually say it, because it must have numbered in the hundreds. Of course there is never a sighting of police in this movie, despite the massive scale of the carnage.
Shoot 'Em Up does get a bit repetitive at times. Yes, I know it may sound silly to say I was bored during a movie in which the action almost literally never stops, but there is little creativity to most of the sequences during the middle third of the film.
However, amends are more than made by the final 20 minutes or so, which contains some of the most entertaining, ridiculous, and hilarious action this side of Grindhouse and Riki-Oh. The closing sequence is slapstick, bloody, and somehow triumphant all at once.
It's almost unimaginable, but Shoot 'Em Up actually seems to try to push a gun control agenda. I wish I could say that Smith doesn't deride "deer hunting with machine guns" minutes after shooting 19 people into oblivion, but I can't. This was one of the aspects that caused my bafflement to stick around through the whole film, along with the omnipresent image of Paul Giamatti fondling a corpse in one of the early scenes.
There's no way around it, this is a pretty messed up movie. But while it's a far cry from perfect, Shoot 'Em Up is still a good time. Fans of the other movies mentioned in this review, along with perhaps Army of Darkness, will be missing out if they don't get in on this. And it might just be worth it for anyone to see Clive Owen finish off bad guys with carrots.