Straight to DVD

Shoot 'Em Up

I tend to bemoan the fact that Whitney and I never get out of our apartment to see movies anymore, but there are benefits. For one, now that we only have time to pop in the occasional DVD, we're a lot more selective than we used to be—which means we're disappointed a lot less often. In fact, I haven't seen much that's truly terrible since starting this column, a fact that had me feeling as if I was letting my editors down (editors love variety).

Well, I don't have to worry anymore.

Shoot 'Em Up made it to the top of our queue mainly because of the presence of Clive Owen (as previously noted, he's among Whitney's faves). We hadn't heard much about it, didn't remember the reviews, and knew only that it also starred Paul Giamatti—whom we also like—and looked like a cartoony noir that might be fun. Oops.

The movie opens with a tough-guy-with-no-name type, Smith (Owen), stumbling upon a woman in labor who's being pursued by a gang of men with guns. He defends her, naturally, and not only successfully fights off the gunmen—who are led by a man named (groan) Mr. Hertz (Giamanti)—but also serves as midwife to the birth during the gunfight. The mother is shot and killed moments thereafter, and Smith reluctantly takes charge of the newborn. With the help of a prostitute, um, acquaintance (Monica Bellucci), he determines to protect the baby from Hertz and to find out why they're after him.

The answer to that question ... well, doesn't really matter; this movie is about the action and the chase, and the infant isn't much more than a MacGuffin that makes funny faces at Owen every now and then. (Whitney objected to the use of baby-as-prop; I found everything about the baby so implausible and unreal that it didn't bother me—but that wasn't exactly a good thing, either.)

Still, decent action films have been made from sillier stuff. Writer-director Michael Davis seems to be aiming to create a tongue-in-cheek, graphic-novel-inspired style piece with snappy, smart one-liners: a Quentin Tarantino movie with a dash of Sin City thrown in. Problem is, Shoot 'Em Up has neither the style of the latter nor the dialogue of the former. Instead, we get a movie where you see the setups for the "clever" lines being painstakingly cranked into position—and the payoff isn't generally worth the effort. (For instance, a neon sign's letters are shot out one by one during a gunfight, until all that's left is "FUK U." Hardy har har.)

Giamatti does his best to salvage matters with a wild, almost desperately over-the-top performance that does have its moments. For his part, Owen mostly marches through a role he's played before in better movies, and Bellucci is completely wasted, given no real character to play and ...a lot of lines like "You are the angriest man in the world!"

To be fair, resting an entire film on style and dialogue is a difficult task; Sin City itself was by no means perfect. But Shoot 'Em Up falls especially flat on both fronts, and the result is exactly what you don't want in your Netflix queue: a boring action film—and a movie we didn't even want to finish watching.