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 reign 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.
