 Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) Director - Michael Davis; Starring - Clive
Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci, Steven McHattie, Daniel Pilon; Screenplay
- Michael Davis; Rated R for violence, language, gore, some nudity and sexual
content; see trailer here.
 I can't recall the last movie I've seen that has dared an
audience to make up their collective minds about it faster than this one. I am mildly surprised there wasn't a manager
at the door ready to hand out refunds as people stood up to go.
And personally, I thank and applaud Michael Davis for the
unmitigated chutzpah it took to make this movie as it is. I made up my mind in the first five
minutes. And had no inclination to
change my mind by the end 85 minutes later.
Clive Owen plays a scruffy looking stranger we know only as
Mr. Smith. While sitting at a bus stop,
he sees a very harried and very pregnant woman come lurching by, chased by a
man in a car with a gun. Smith, already
deep in the middle of things, is compelled to intervene. His intervention results in numerous dead
bodies, including the aforementioned mother, and one newborn infant boy that
Smith now feels duty bound to try and find a home for. Doing so requires that Smith stay at least
one step ahead of Hertz (Paul Giamatti), a somewhat glib family man who also
happens to be a tremendously creepy professional killer, hell bent on killing
the baby and Smith.
Smith enlists the aid of Donna (Monica Bellucci), a low-rent
hooker who happens to serve a particular fetish base that provides Smith with a
necessary resource in keeping the baby alive.
Donna and Smith have some history together which causes the expected
tensions and sparks to fly as they move to stay ahead of Hertz, while trying to
figure out why Hertz finds it so pressing to kill the baby. Unraveling the mystery leads them to a
ruthless gun manufacturer (Steven McHattie) and a Senator running for President
(Daniel Pilon).
The truth is this summary actually makes the film sound
subtler than it is in reality. In fact,
any summary of the movie more extensive than the four words "bullets, blood and
boobs" puts the film closer to any of the three main stars' art house film
appearances than what you actually see on the screen. It may seem ludicrous to make this claim, but
having seen both films I think I'm a fair position to do so with authority: Snakes on a Plane wasn't as high concept
as this film. It also wasn't as much
fun.
Delving into another film to make a point for a moment...Snakes on a Plane was doomed to failure
because the hype and internet buzz that surrounded it set a standard that
couldn't possibly ever be reached. With
the noise that preceded the film's release, anything that wasn't a combination
of the thrills of Jurassic Park with
the subtle nuance and human drama of Gandhi
was going to be a disappointment. What Snakes ultimately delivered was
something I'm coming around to thinking of as perhaps what needs to be a new
sub-genre: the WYSIWYG movie.
For what it gave you was Samuel L. Jackson. And motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking
plane. Anything else was just going to
get in the way.
In that exact same spirit, director and screenwriter Michael
Davis tells you exactly what he's going to have his actors do right in the
title. Shoot ‘em up they do, in as well
as beat ‘em up, stab ‘em through, and in at least one instance, chop ‘em
up. What makes it worth watching is that
Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti seem to be having so much damn fun doing that, I
couldn't help but get caught up in the flow with them.
Owen has made a very diverse and distinguished film career
for himself by playing roles that run the gamut. From the complex intensity of Croupier or Inside Man, to the blunter fierceness of Sin City, Owen has always played characters with a singular sense
of purpose. So seeing his Smith exhibit
the same sort of tunnel vision through a character that is probably the least
disposed of any he's played to ask why he does what he does is hysterical just
for the lark that it seems to be.
There's even a meta-read on the movie that I think could
spark a lively discussion that posits Owen's Smith as a live cartoon character,
the human amalgamation of Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner to Giamatti's Wile E.
Coyote. Given how the action sequences
are staged, stretching credulity beyond all reasonable bounds, it does feel
like a cartoon in many ways, albeit an adult one. That Owen plays it so perfectly straight the
whole way through is a testament to Owen's acting ability because I'll be
damned how he didn't completely lose it and bust a gut laughing on every
take. And when he blandly delivers the
stock action hero one-liners, the seriousness he imparts to the delivery makes
them even more laughable and exposes that filmmaking quirk in the genre for the
absurdity that it is.
And the straight man that Owen plays in Smith is the perfect
foil to Giamatti's Hertz, a character as batshit loony as I think Giamatti's
ever played. When Giamatti failed to get
nominated for an Oscar for Sideways,
the second such time he was unjustly passed over following on 2003's American Splendor, I once remarked to a
friend, "Who do I need to sleep with to get this man his due?" As an actor, Giamatti is one of the most
undervalued performers working today. He
very nearly single-handedly saved Lady in
the Water, a movie I think might violate the Geneva Conventions for torture
without him in it, it's that miserable.
So to see him taking a role like Hertz that so easily could
resort to stock bad guy tribe and sink his teeth into it with such zeal only
further reaffirms in my mind what a treasure he truly is. Giamatti just can't make Hertz a
villain. He has to make him
simultaneously a tremendously creepy and coldly vicious killer, and an
overreaching goober that's not half as smart as he thinks he is. A self-proclamation of himself as a "Super
Genius" would seem to be as natural coming from his mouth as it would be from
Wile E., and in both cases it's a hilarious misnomer.
Giamatti's performance really comes together in beautiful
confluence in a scene about a third of the way through. He's sitting in a car with the corpse of the
mother of the infant he's trying to kill, and he does something that just makes
my skin crawl. It's a vile, repulsive
moment and Hertz's face holds a look that is equal parts perverse thrill and
self-loathing. And then as the low
wattage bulb that represents his brain comes on to bring Hertz around to a
fairly basic realization, he utters a line that is as absurd as anything I've
heard in any action movie. But he import
he tries to imbue the line with makes it funnier than its inherent absurdity
could ever allow for.
Bellucci is the only weak acting link among the primaries,
not because she's a bad actress, but she's just not terribly comfortable it
seems delivering much of the dialogue.
Whether it's because of a unfamiliarity or discomfort with English
personally, or just awkward direction with her lines in general, her spark
really only comes through when she starts rattling off curses at Smith in
Italian. In those moments, she's an
Italian spitfire with beauty and presence that would do Sophia Loren
proud. As it stands, she makes a fair
bit of the role work with her body language and looks, so it doesn't wind up as
bad as it could have been. But there's
some potential there that I think was wasted with the things they could have
done with her character.
In the end though, what happens with Bellucci's Donna
becomes more of a secondary concern simply because as I stated earlier, this is
a full-bore "guy" movie in most every way.
And part of what makes it that kind of "guy" movie is that blood and
guts carnage that runs quite liberally from beginning to end. It's that violence that will wind up turning a
number of people off, but for some varying reasons.
One group of people will argue that this movie glorifies
violence and is just another example of Hollywood decadence. My argument to those people would be to
lighten up and get a clue. The violence
and action, as I've stated many times before, is cartoonish in the
extreme. No one in their right mind is
going to watch this and think it has any bearing in any way with what happens
with guns in real life. The people who
see it and do think there's a core of reality in it need to run down to Costco
and see if they can get a pallet of perspective at a good price. There's free delivery with that, I'm sure.
The cartoon aspect leads to a second school of thought, one
that I think will be in the minority but is going to be no less obnoxious. "All of those gunfights were so over the top,
they just became stupid. I mean really,
how could he hit that merry-go-round that many times exactly on a run?" For those people, I ask: Have you seen Live Free of Die Hard? Have you seen Transporter 2? Or any one of
a number of big budget action pieces of trash that thinks, "If we can blow up
it bigger, louder, or in a more convoluted way than anyone has before, we'll
make a fortune!"
If anything, the movie does a delicious job of sending up
those same absurd constructs in high fashion.
The stunt coordinator may as well list an "Inspired by" credit for Rube
Goldberg. Yet the action does pay some
homage to those same movies it savages in its own imitations. There's a shootout in a building that ends in
almost the same utterly incredulous stunt that closes out The Bourne Identity, and a sky diving sequence that one-ups Point
Break in the only fashion Hot Fuzz
didn't touch earlier this year.
Again, it all comes back to that opening sequence and that
first five minutes. The whole set piece
from beginning to end is ridiculously insane, predictable in the outcome
(including one sight gag involving a neon sign), and frenetically paced. It had most of the audience I saw the film
with laughing uproariously from beginning to end. The sheer audacity of how far Davis was
willing to stretch the boundaries of credulity is what makes it a winner for
me.
At one point in the film, Hertz asks the rhetorical question
of his hired muscle, "Do we really suck that much, or is this guy really that
good?" Davis is likely going to see much
of his audience asking that same question about him and his movie.
My vote is unquestionably for the latter.
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