Part 2 of our game of catch-up is “Shoot ‘em Up,” featuring a couple familiar faces and a lot of guns.  Also carrots.

Un: And boobs.

The first of many "death by carrot" scenes in the movie. We are off to the races!

Premise: 3.5/5

Once upon a time, there was this hobo sitting on a bench eating a carrot while a pregnant woman ran by screaming.  Right after that, some clearly ill-intentioned dude with a giant gun shows up to chase her down with murder on his mind.  Then suddenly, super-hobo springs to the lady’s aid, offing the evildoer with a carrot before going completely ballistic and killing like twenty dudes at once.  Then another hour of nonstop shooting, running, jumping, and more shooting took place.  Super-hobo wins the day, saves the baby (not the mom), and gets the criminally hot babe.

Giamatti's line in this scene as he uses one of his lackeys who's been shot is, literally: "Stop squirming, you're ruining my aim." How can you not love that?

One reviewer on imdb had this to say about “Shoot ‘em Up”:  “From babies being delivered in the middle of gunfights, people having sex in the middle of gunfights, people parachuting in the middle of gunfights, gunfights in the middle of gunfights, this film is loud, clichéd, stupid and just basically a mess.”  Clearly that reviewer was not impressed.  However, everything up to the “clichéd,” and “stupid” part, I agree with him on.  What he says is pretty much true, but that’s also the movie’s charm.  I’m hard-pressed to come up with a more obviously over-the-top tongue-in-cheek flick like this that kept me consistently entertained with every mounting absurdity.  No, the part where he’s got bullets between his broken fingers, sticks his hand in the fireplace, and has the bullets shoot the shit out of the bad guy could never happen, but who gives a damn?  The important thing is its funny.

This movie is pretty much a live-action cartoon throwback to the action movies we all grew up on in the ‘80s, with a hefty dose of video game inspired adrenaline-feeding insanity.  It is a dumb movie, but it’s dumb on purpose and succeeds as the straight-faced parody (no winking Wayans brothers here) it’s so clearly intended to be.  The dude kills people with a fucking CARROT.  Not even just once, but a few times, in different ways.  I mean come on!  It’s like Bugs Bunny meets Commando (review coming soon, probably), so if you’re taking the movie seriously, you’re doing it wrong.

Yeah, this all happened in the course of a gunfight.

Cast: 3/5

Our two familiar faces here are Clive Owens, who plays super-hobo (aka Smith), and Paul Giamatti.  If the Clive Owens in this movie replaced the Clive Owens in Sin City, I’d have given that movie a 5/5 for cast after all.  He’s just so outrageous with all of his stunts, never breaks a sweat, and never looks particularly out of sorts as he’s killing legions of mooks at a time, which is what makes this movie great.  He macks the one-liners like our ‘80s heroes did, somehow managing to turn the line “eat your vegetables” into something both weirdly badass and ridiculously dumb-funny.

Paul Giamatti is Hertz, the Elmer Fudd to Owens’ Bugs.  He’s always got the drop on Smith, he’s got the best guns and all the goons he could ask for, but yet he never quite manages to get the job done and finish Smith off.  Good chance this is because of (again, like Bugs) Smith’s utter disregard for rules of physics, common sense, and, frankly, reality.  Not only does it seem like Giamatti’s loving his role as the sinister intellectual who still can’t catch a break, but he also knows how to chew a scene just right to amp up the comedy.  It’s a joy to watch Owens and Giamatti’s scenes together, because you just know something priceless is going to come out of it.

Skydiving, shooting, and throwing a guy into a helicopter's blades are all part of a day's work for super-hobo.

The behind-the-scenes bad guys in the movie, however, are sadly lacking.  One’s a crazy gun manufacturer whose every line of dialog is actually painful to hear, the other’s a corrupt senator making a presidential bid while he tries to farm babies for bone-marrow.  They fight crime!  Or cause it!  Something!  Anyways, these guys should’ve just been relegated to sinister voices on a telephone giving ominous-sounding orders, but instead we have to suffer through scenes with these sub-par dudes talking when we really just want to get to the next outlandish gunfight.

Un: Also, Monica Bellucci as a lactating hooker is awesome.  Now wait a minute; what’s with Clive Owen playing badasses that used to have flings with fetishistic prostitutes?  Was there a hotty hooker in Children of Men?  Anyway, boobs ftw.

I don't really have anything to add to this.

Technical:  3/5

There’s a lot of shooting, lots of blood, and a kickin’ hard rock soundtrack that makes this movie a blast (see what I did there?) to watch.  I’ve long been waiting for a hyper-kinetic gunfight choreographed to Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and this movie did not disappoint me in that department.  Hell, the action scenes can even make a Nirvana song sound cool (well, cool-ish).

Actually, the only thing that I really didn’t like was the parachuting-gunfight.  I applaud the audacity of a scene like that, but the CG and green screen effects looked rather shite during that broad-daylight (and thus, even more glaringly obvious) sequence.  Still, I can’t hate on it too bad, since it delivered so well in so many other ways.

Oh, and BTW . . . Owens doesn't just use carrots and guns to fight bad guys. He is actually using HIS OWN BLOOD from an open wound as a weapon here.

Popcorn Factor: 3.5/5

This movie’s all about pure, crazy entertainment, and I appreciate that.  At times the constant gunning can border on repetitive and deadening, but then something comes along from out of left field and you’re back to having a ludicrously good time.  It’s an utterly insane rollercoaster ride through bullets, babies, boobies, and badass music.

However, the plot—such as it is—leaves me a bit confused and comes close to bringing the movie way down.  While the plot is paper-thin, the more I try to think about it the stupider it gets (only this time, not in a good way).  See . . . the baby-farming thing is for the Senator who wants to get in the White House as a Democrat, and he sees his way to doing that through tightening the fist on gun control laws.  The gun manufacturer, obviously a murderous bastard, has problems with that.  The conflict here leads to Smith having lines about how the gun companies want to make it legal to hunt deer with uzis, and if the backstory Hertz puts together for Smith is the correct one, Smith sold some guns to a few thugs once upon a time, who then proceeded to blow away everyone in a fast food restaurant across the way, including Smith’s wife and kid.  So from that it sounds like the movie is pro-gun control, even though the Democrat is also an evil bastard, and every situation in this movie is resolved through copious amounts of bullets fired out of guns.  I don’t know if the movie is trying to have a heavy-handed moral, or if the contradictory nature of dialog to action is just another spot of parody.  Hulk confused, want smash!

Un: The more I think about it, the more I believe you were right to ignore most of the “plot” and assume its intentionally nonsensical farce.  This is a movie where a man with a gun, instead of shooting his opponent, shoots a file cabinet so the drawer pops out and hits the opponent in the face.  There’s your plot.