Sunday, September 9, 2007

Shoot 'Em Up

Friday night, I saw Shoot 'Em Up. Minor spoiler warning. What a ride. This movie stars the engaging Clive Owen, the luscious Monica Belluci, and the evil, evil, bad Paul Giamatti.

Shoot 'Em Up
makes few pretensions at reality. Clive Owen makes his first kill with a carrot as the movie opens, and the bullets unloaded as this movie blasts through its paces probably beggar even Starship Troopers. Don't watch this flick if you want realistic gunplay: Transformers and practically any cartoon are more realistic. (!) Don't go if you're looking for something more serious than R-rated comic opera, well acted, which is ironic. If you want to see a funny eighty minute explosion with some excellent sound bites that will soon adorn "witty" sig lines on UBBs across the WWW, this is the movie for you.

Despite my liking for this movie, an attempt to make this an anti-firearm morality play feebly raises its head. Unfortunately for any serious attempt at such a stance, evil genius Paul Giamatti makes the point early on that the high-tech thumbprint-enabling on his Desert Eagle helps keep firearms from being used by criminals. But, since the bad guys could be sponsored by the government, how helpful is the pie-in-the-sky thumbprinting scheme? Not so much. Also, it's hard to make a a sex-stereotyped sermon about people with firearms being "pussies with guns" when your hero can kill people with a carrot, and if the hero uses a tool consistently throughout the flick, can the tool be inherently evil? Not really.

3.5 out of 5 stars because the thunder of the guns handily overwhelms the traditional Hollywood hypocrisy. And because gunsmiths are superheroes.

2 comments:

phlegmfatale said...

WOw - that sounds fantastic and I love those 3 actors. Now, how did I manage to miss this one utterly? Never heard of it.

日月神教-向左使 said...
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