Less than five minutes into Shoot ’Em Up, Owen’s uber-badass hero without a name kills a guy by jamming a carrot through the back of his skull, and then quips, “Eat your vegetables.” If you think that sounds like the awesomest thing ever, then you’ll probably love Shoot ’Em Up, a vulgar, smug and willfully stupid movie that’s both a lazy pseudo-parody of action films and a particularly egregious example of the genre itself.
Straight-to-video lifer Davis somehow managed to get real stars and a big budget for this piece of worthless trash, but just because Owen, Giamatti and Bellucci can act doesn’t mean that they can elevate Davis’ brain-dead script or bring gravity or heart to his painful dramatic scenes. Owen can, however, appear menacing while chomping on a carrot (which he does repeatedly throughout the movie), and Giamatti looks like he’s having fun going from schlub to sadist for at least one film.
The ever-present carrot serves as more than just a fanboy-baiting gimmick; it’s also an unsubtle indicator that we’re meant to take the whole movie as a live-action cartoon, as bound to realism as an old Looney Tunes short. Owen is the unkillable Bugs Bunny to Giamatti’s Elmer Fudd, who goes through dozens of anonymous henchmen in his quest to eliminate not only Owen but also a newborn baby he rescues from its dying mother in the film’s opening moments.
There’s also a convoluted conspiracy plot that never makes any sense, and an annoyingly disingenuous moral about gun control that’s so condescending you can almost hear Davis behind the camera laughing at his audience. He goes overboard trying to impress with a number of action set pieces, but they’re never as exciting as he seems to think they are, and his visual style is flat and pedestrian, somehow making the elaborate stunts come off as less impressive than they must have really been.
Like last year’s much more entertaining Crank, Shoot ’Em Up takes its aesthetic and thematic cues from hyperkinetic video games, and thus exhausts its energy rather quickly (at 80 minutes, it feels almost twice as long). But unlike the people behind Crank, Davis doesn’t seem to understand how to creatively harness this new paradigm; he just ends up mimicking the worst qualities of what he must think his audience wants.
Shoot 'Em Up
* 1/2
Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci
Directed by Michael Davis
Rated R
Opens Friday