“Shoot’em Up” Hits the Bull’s-eye
Deadly carrots, gun fights in midair and a birth where the umbilical cord is severed by a bullet are just a few things you can look forward to if you go and see “Shoot ‘Em Up.”
“Shoot ‘Em Up” stars Clive Owen (“Children of Men”) and Paul Giamatti (“Lady in the Water”). Owen plays a mysterious man, Mr. Smith, who’s amazing with a gun and loves his carrots. Giamatti plays Mr. Hertz (no doubt named for all the pain he’s caused), an insanely evil hitman trying to kill Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith is flung into the action as he helps a woman give birth under a hail of gunfire. We don’t know why everyone is trying to kill the woman; we just know that they are. When the woman dies just after giving birth, Mr. Smith is forced to look after the child as he tries to piece together a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the government.
I’m not making this up when I say the plot involves a senator who needs the bone marrow of infants to keep himself alive. In any other movie, this plot would kill it. But, here is a movie so self-aware that it makes fun of its own plot. Mr. Smith figures everything out without even thinking, almost as if the movie itself is winking at all the other action movies saying, “Come on. The only reason you made this film was so you could shoot guns and blow stuff up.”
And that’s exactly what they do. The action is fast and relentless. All the while, Mr. Smith never seems to break a sweat. Along the way, he also dispenses his own forms of justice on people who discipline their children in public, change lanes without signaling and slurp their drinks too loudly (for some reason I think Michael Davis, the director, really hates all of those things too).
The gun fight scenes are original and creative. The humor is dark. The violence exits the world of reality and enters the land of the cartoonish, almost reminding us of a Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon except with a lot more blood. But above all, the acting is superb. Owen and Giamatti play their over-the-top characters with such seriousness that we actually believe them.
This movie is not for the squeamish. But, let me just say this. For anyone who goes to this movie and walks out disgusted, I ask you: Did you not read the title?
-Aaron.Peck@aggiemail.usu.edu