Shallow 'Shoot 'em Up' packs heat and action
For action junkies who love violent video games and have no need for characters, plots, emotions and originality, the aptly titled "Shoot 'em Up" works like crack on retinas.
The setup is sweet and simple: A mystery man sees a group of armed thugs trying to kill a pregnant woman on the street.
Succumbing to his heroic instincts, the mystery man goes into kinetic overdrive, running, shooting, pulling and punching his way through vacant, rundown buildings until he winds up with a newborn baby, a dead mother and an army of hit men after him.
That's the premise, plot and point of "Shoot 'em Up," a violent exploitation film from writer/director Michael Davis, a really sick puppy who gleefully plunders his concepts and cliches from John Woo, Jackie Chan and a host of other Hong Kong filmmakers while adding a bit of film noir to the mix.
Clive Owen, a British actor, stars as the hero, an unshaven fellow who goes by the name of Smith. He kills people by ramming carrots through the back of their necks or into their eyes.
The great character actor Paul Giamatti, on a roll now with this movie, "The Nanny Diaries" and the upcoming "Fred Claus," stars as the fiendish leader Hertz (get it?). Obsessed with power and big guns, Hertz orders his goons to find the baby and kill it. Smith, too.
Meanwhile, Smith takes the newborn to the only person who can help him, a prostitute named Donna Quintano. She's played by Monica Bellucci, Italy's hottest export since Sophia Loren. A recent mother, Donna has breast milk, apparently a bonus for her many male clients. (I said the director was a sick puppy.)
With Donna along as an unwilling accomplice struggling to spit out her English dialogue, Smith sets out to protect the baby and discover why Hertz wants it dead.
Some of the set pieces in "Shoot 'em Up" approach inspirational levels, such as a full-blown gunfight in the sky when Smith and his pursuers jump out of jets with parachutes, then go at it with bullets and fists.
Then the movie falls back on the stupidest action movie cliché in history, the tired Woo gimmick of two opponents pointing their guns in each other's faces, but inexplicably never shooting. They just talk each other to death.
Between violent confrontations and the sexual degradation of women, "Shoot 'em Up" never bores.
But it will never achieve the level of a "Lethal Weapon," "The Wild Bunch" or even "Die Hard," movies that transform violent acts into visual poetry without sacrificing the humanity of the characters and the integrity of a well-told story.
"Shoot 'em Up"
2 stars
out of four
Opens today
Starring As
Clive Owen Smith
Paul Giamatti Hertz
Monica Bellucci Donna Quintano
Written and directed by Michael Davis. Produced by Susan Montford, Don Murphy and Rick Benattar. A New Line Cinema release. Rated R (violence, language, sexual situations). Running time: 87 minutes.