Movie Review: Shoot 'Em Up - Page 2

As said prostitute, Monica Bellucci is beautiful and womanly and fabulous and unintelligible as always, to the point that it took me a while to realize that at least some of the time I couldn't understand her, it was because she was speaking something I decided was Portuguese, but maybe that's because I just discovered this awesome new wine from Portugal and am therefore prone to romanticizing. Needless to say there are people, bad people, who would like that baby dead for, it is safe to say, quite nefarious reasons (are there any non-nefarious reasons to want to kill an infant?) and thus would like Owen and Ms. Bellucci dead too.

While Shoot 'Em Up was still in production, my brother spoke with an acquaintance of his who was working on the special effects for the movie. When he told my brother what he was working on, Dave asked if that was the working title for the movie. No, he was told, that's the title. Almost refreshingly, there is absolutely nothing ironic about the title Shoot 'Em Up. This is a movie about people shooting at each other. There are no chase scenes involving French dudes running up the sides of walls. Clive Owen does not eliminate battalions of evil minions using capybara, the exclusive South American martial art of the guinea pig shaman. He shoots people. He shoots them in a stairwell. He shoots them in the bathroom. He shoots them while he eats. He shoots them while he and Monica Bellucci have sex, in a scene I hope was as fun to make as it was to watch. Occasionally when his gun jams or he runs out of ammo, he does kill people with carrots (organic and grown in his own garden!), but guns are clearly his preferred method of communication.

If there's a problem with Shoot 'Em Up, and I'm not saying there is (see earlier reference to Ho-Ho), it's that the film doesn't really know what it is. The movie is filled with the kind of groaners your Great Uncle Morty enjoyed after spending an afternoon playing "pull my finger," but it never levitates to full-blown, laugh out loud comedy, or even the kind of sporadic hysteria that marks Tarantino films. Shoot 'Em Up certainly lacks the wit and joie de vivre that made Hot Fuzz such a tremendous homage to buddy cop movies.

Article Author: Kati Irons

I am a film and music librarian for a public library system. Like many of my kind, I suffer from RKS, or Random Knowledge Syndrome. These musings are the inevitable end result of that condition.

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