Why review it at all? Title says it all, doesn't it?
Almost.
Apart from the failed Harley Davidson and the
Marlboro Man, Shoot 'em Up may be the first movie
which is truly post-post modernist. I suppose Pulp
Fiction is a post-modernist film if for no other
reason than it derives nothing from life first-hand.
It is not a gangster movie about gangsters, ala
Casino, but rather a gangster movie about fictional
gangsters and other gangster movies. Sin City is
similarly post-modernist in that it brings animation
to a comic book which is not about real people in
the real world, but essentially about comic book
characters in their own plane of existence. Shoot
em' Up removes the action one level further from
reality. While Pulp Fiction, Sin City, Besson's
films, Richie's films, and their many imitators
function simultaneously as homages to and satires of
pulp gangster stories, Shoot 'em Up functions as an
homage to and satire of those very films! Its
characters are so broad and its action so outrageous
that Vince McMahon and Frank Miller would be
envious. The best post-modernist films like Pulp
Fiction and Sin City, while often funny, continued
to take their storylines seriously and to include
somber moments. Shoot 'em Up does not. It's on the
high-wire of parody and is so surreal and
over-the-top that it seems to be a screen
incarnation of Jim Steranko's wildest fantasies
about "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." The star,
Clive Owen, even resembles Steranko's Fury, right
down to the permanent stubble, lacking only the
signature eyepatch to make the impersonation
perfect. (The actual Fury character was played by
David Hasselhoff in the lame official adaptation. It
might have been a decent movie with Owen in the
lead.)
Does it all work?
Kinda.
If you watch any individual scene in the film, you
might find it wildly entertaining. Here are three
examples:
- Clive Owen has a shoot 'em up with some baddies
while he midwifes a baby, cutting the umbilical
cord with a well-placed bullet.
- Clive Owen has a shoot 'em up with more baddies
while he's having sex with Monica Bellucci, never
withdrawing from her and bringing her to a climax
as he blasts away. After capping the thugs, he
also caps the action with a quip, James Bond
style: "Talk about shooting your load."
- Clive Owen has a shoot 'em Up with some baddies
in mid air, after they all jump from a plane.
After he reaches the ground safely, Clive walks
through a field strewn with the bodies of his
enemies, all fallen from the heavens, all dead
before they hit the ground.
I could go on, but the rest of the list would
consist of items similar to those above: outrageous,
tongue-in cheek action battles with fewer nuances
than a WWE rivalry, populated with comic book
anti-heroes and villains. Owen does more smiting of
his enemies than Yahweh.
The plot, such as it is, involves a corrupt Senator
who needs a bone marrow transplant. Lacking the
donors, he plans to impregnate gazillions of
woman and harvest the compatible bone marrow from
his own offspring. He doesn't even plan to get the
women pregnant the fun way, as Bill Clinton might do
in the same situation. They are artificially
inseminated.
As the film begins,
Clive Owen, doing his usual neo-Bogart reluctant
hero schtick, gets caught in between the Senator's
minions and a woman about to give birth to one of
the babies. The unshaven, angry Owen somehow ends up
caring for the baby, enlisting the aid of a
lactating hooker named DQ. (She's the baby's "Dairy
Queen," get it?) An infinite supply of baddies comes
after Clive, led by an evil genius named Mr. Hertz
(Paul Giamatti), whose only vulnerability is that
he's a henpecked husband whose wife continually
objects when he comes home later than planned from a
night of brutal slaughter and torture. Despite his
brilliance, his ruthlessness, and his army of thugs,
Mr. Hertz is unable to rein in our hero for
more than a few moments. By the end of the film
Clive builds up a body count that must rival
Stalin's.
I'm confident that if you watch any one scene from
the film, you will get the urge to see the entire
production, as I did. And yet when all of those
scenes are strung together, the film tends to wear
out its welcome, even at an economical running time.
It's no simple task to write a review of such a
film. Shoot 'em Up is the cinematic equivalent of
eating an entire box of rich chocolates in one
sitting - every bit of it is delicious, but the
cumulative effect is a sense of being over-sated.
It's witty and crazy and fun ... but it may be too
much of a good thing, or maybe the same good thing
too many times. How do you sum it all up when you
love every scene in the film and find it all to be
touched by mad genius, but just got tired of it
after a while?
I guess I just did.
