If nothing else, Shoot 'Em Up remains true to its unapologetic title from start to finish. The bullet shells that clatter to the ground throughout must number in the thousands. In the film's opening sequence, empty casings bounce jauntily off the stomach of a woman in the throes of giving birth in a warehouse, while the film's reluctant hero, Mr. Smith — played with understated British aplomb by Clive Owen — cuts down a seemingly never-ending stream of gunmen intent on killing the woman and her offspring. Smith, a lone wolf with a penchant for noisily munching on carrots, is inadvertently sucked into a vortex of kink and violence when he takes on the responsibility of saving and protecting the newborn boy after the mother is killed. With no place for respite or escape in the city's decaying urban sprawl, Smith enlists a lactating hooker to nurse his new charge. Enter the 21st century's answer to Sophia Loren, Italian sex siren Monica Bellucci. Part Madonna, part whore, Bellucci's character, "DQ" (stands for "Dairy Queen"), must flee her fantasy romper room (stocked with breast-milk-filled baby bottles and XXL male diapers) when the ruthless Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti, playing against type) tracks down Smith and baby to her brothel.
As in Alfonso Cuaron's gritty Children of Men, Owen is again playing an unexpected father figure whose mission is to save a singularly unique and important infant against unimaginable odds. While Men presented an almost too-real vision of a future dystopia, Shoot 'Em Up is merely a live-action cartoon that unfolds like the pages of a comic book, with a handful of cardboard characters hurtling the dimly outlined plot forward at ferocious speed.
Director Davis, unashamedly referencing the films of John Woo, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Sergio Leone, pitched his project by compiling a 17-minute reel of animated footage of the film's major action sequences. The finished product never manages to escape that painstakingly storyboarded quality, resulting in a juggernaut of boxed vignettes strung together under a hail of bullets. Attempts to rescue the lead characters from their two-dimensionality with vaguely fleshed out backstories (e.g., the whys behind Hertz's baby-harvesting ways and DQ's maternal powers) remain secondary to Davis's overriding ambition to load each frame of his first studio movie with every wishful cinematic trick and reference involving gun slinging and deft action play. This could serve the film's gonzo-thriller intent if Davis had the filmmaking chops to pull it off. Sadly, he hasn't. A gunfight while Smith and killer paratroopers are free-falling from an airplane is laugh-out-loud bad, a poor pastiche of the Bond films that it is supposed to honor.
Subscribing to the notion that violence is more fun when there's also sex, the picture nods to necrophilia, sadism, fetishism, and role play — all of which culminates in an unforgettable moment wherein Smith shoots his way to freedom with DQ wrapped around his hips, grinding her way to orgasm. For certain lovers of the over-the-top, all-out action film who are neither squeamish nor lactose intolerant, the film's sensory overload could prove just the right combination of guns and, um, racks — the sort of thing that's been largely absent from screens this summer (given such chaste blockbusters as Live Free or Die Hard). And as a bonus, it contains, at least, the best death-by-carrot scene in the history of film.
VIEW: Shoot 'Em Up Red Carpet
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