Shoot 'Em Up

After a career mostly spent writing children’s animated dinosaur movies and writing and directing fluffy romantic pics, Michael Davis steps up and, in my book, scores a near bullseye with a misunderstood satire of the recent Jason Stathem/Vin Diesel ultra-violent anti-hero thrillers.

Clive Owen is Smith, the anti-hero at the core of Shoot ‘Em Up, and, as he did in Children of Men, shows why he was most everyone’s first choice to be the current Bond (even though Daniel Craig was fine too). He faces off against henpecked hitman Hertz (Paul Giamatti, taking his cues off Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Mission: Impossible III global bad guy) attempting to protect a beautiful whore (the beyond gorgeous Monica Belluci) and an infant whose mother died in Smith’s arms.

How does Davis turn the cartoon-level violence on its head? For starters, Smith’s signature killing move is driving a carrot through an opponent’s eye–and having Smith, a real invisible man further off the radar than Gene Hackman’s character in Enemy of the State, actually grow his own carrots in the vacant building in which he squats. That’s what I call a whole ‘nother level.

In the current batch of one man going up against an army of killers movies, the protagonist somehow evades multiple fusillades of bullets but Owen and Belluci take this to ridiculous heights in Shoot ‘Em Up, with two confrontations towards the end, one in Smith’s squat and the other where Owen tracks Giamatti to his client and attacks their lair. The idea that his aim–and luck–is so much better than every single one of the baddies’, well, I just have to laugh.

Warning: Though this is decidedly a satire, and a high-grade one, I want to be clear that bullets and blood are onscreen in massive quantities.

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