dir: Michael Davis
[img_assist|nid=12|title=Babysitting with a gun makes sense to me|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=328|height=450]
Imagine a film where the hero shoots hundreds if not thousands of people. Imagine that same film actually has an anti-gun agenda as its plot.
Collect the pieces of your head after it’s exploded all over the place, and then try not to think about it again. Or about how truly loopy this movie is.
If you’re a fan of utterly mad gunfest actions films, especially the kind of stuff John Woo used to be able to produce back before whatever talent he possessed was drained out of him by Hollywood, then this insane flick is for you.
As my Canadian friend said of the film, he stopped watching it when, in the film’s first few minutes, the hero kills a bad guy with a carrot.
A few minutes later, he’s cutting a newborn baby’s umbilical by shooting it. That’s the insane level this flick is operating on. And it either gets better or worse, dependent upon your sensibilities.
Smith (Clive Owen), who looks like little more than a carrot-chewing homeless person, steps in to a situation not of his making. A heavily pregnant woman is being chased by goons intent on killing her, and he reluctantly steps in to save her. This sets him on a path of conflict with some progressively nastier men.
Essentially, he’s looking after a newborn baby for most of the flick’s length, and trying to nut out a fairly convoluted plot. But let’s be serious here: it’s not like the plot really matters. He’s killing people with carrots, for crying out loud. And he is a maestro of gunplay, which means he creatively shoots hundreds and hundreds of goons over the film’s spastic 80 or so minutes.
On his trail is a former FBI agent now turned to the more profitable dark side, Hertz (Paul Giamatti), who is in league with a gun manufacturer and against or with some senator who was about to initiate gun control legislation. Hertz is so smart that the flick uses his genius-level intelligence to tell him where his quarry (in the form of Smith, the baby and a lactating prostitute played by Monica Bellucci) is going to be, so that the script doesn’t have to deal with the pesky details of having a credible way for the plot to move forward. One hilariously embarrassing scene (well, at least it should be embarrassing for the screenwriters) has Hertz inferring from any details he sees on a street he is being driven down as to what Smith’s been doing and where he’s going. How wonderful that Smith only chose to drive in a straight line.
Smith is such a amalgamation of all the tropes and archetypes to do with the violent action hero that he’s practically the epitome and a parody of the violent action hero at the same time. I’m wondering if that sentence was one of those kinds of sentences that irritates the fuck out of people because it seems both academically pretentious and obscure for obscurity’s own sake. I guess just like that last sentence.
Whatever. In case you missed it before, yes, I did write that Monica Bellucci, the belle of European cinema, a woman so gorgeous that she hurts the eyes and groin, plays a prostitute whose specialty is lactation. That’s milk, for the uninitiated. She caters for something quite strange but awfully convenient for a plot in which a newborn infant needs sustenance. She just so happens to be a former flame of Smith’s, so, you know, that’s even better.
Being a supergenius, Hertz tracks them because he’s smart enough to know everything that anyone will do or think before they do it, until it’s not helpful for him to do so. He unleashes wave after wave of Canadian goons at Smith (the movie is clearly shot in Toronto), who doesn’t hesitate to kill them all in the most violent and hilarious ways.
In the John Woo classic, and I use that word carefully, Hard Boiled, there is an extended sequence of action where our hero Tequila is parading through the corridors of a burning hospital, shooting multiple henchmen all whilst holding a baby the entire time, or doing stunts that would even make baby-dangler Michael Jackson blanch with fear. Shoot ‘Em Up seems to take its inspiration from that and decides to take it to even more absurd extremes.
It might be a bridge too far even for staunch action fans, who could be offended by just how cartoonish and how nasty many scenes are in this flick. I guess it didn’t bother me, because I miss some of the more outlandish Hong Kong flicks of the late 80s/early 90s. This flick takes it to too much of an extreme, which highlights the unbelievability in a deliberate attempt to ward off wowserish criticism. But it’s still a kick for me to watch a guy shooting out two legs of a table in order to be able to slide off it into the perfect dismount from which to shoot four different people before hitting the ground running.
The fact that they work in the anti-gun stuff seems like a bit of a piss-take more than anything else. How a film could have hundreds of people artfully dispatched with gun fire, and yet have as its plot the machinations of a gun manufacturer to prevent gun control legislation from passing, and still expect to be taken serious would be a tad confusing. That is, if it was asking to be taken seriously.
In a flick where the perpetually sleazy Giamatti compliments a dead woman on her breasts with the line “Nice knockers”, who’s asking to be taken seriously?
I’ve always found it strange that Paul Giamatti, who routinely plays pathetic and sleazy characters, is as well regarded as he is. Don’t get me wrong, he a wonderful actor, but even though people see him as a bit of a sad-sack himself, they don’t always associate him with his characters. Here he gets the chance to be out and out villainous, and he seems to enjoy himself in a flick that wasn’t going to pay that well (it utterly bombed at the box office) and for which the critics weren’t going to be kind or complimentary.
As a flick that was made in Canada, there are a whole bunch of Canadians, surprisingly, in prominent roles, which warmed the cockles and sub-cockles of my heart. I mean most non-Canadians aren’t going to give two hoots about guys like Stephen McHattie or Julian Richings appearing in this flick, but it amused me.
Especially considering what an insane flick with an insanely maniacal ending it is. If you could imagine, whilst drunk and stoned, what the most far-fetched possible ending to a flick like this could be, as in, how will our hero triumph over the boo hiss villains? Then cube it, square root it, multiply it by the GDP of Lithuania and then divide it by the number of saints molesting angels on the head of a pin, and it’s still not going to be as ludicrous as what transpires here.
The last time I watched a flick this ludicrous that tried to tightrope the gulf between potentially terrible and oddly enjoyable, it was a movie called Crank, which had a protagonist who’d been poisoned with a chemical that necessitates his indulging in every crime known to man and the consumption of every drug and stimulant available whilst trying to kill all the people involved in his pre-mortem death. I give this flick more credit, because it’s not recorded like a crystal meth addict’s nightmares, and because the stunts are better coordinated, with a better lead in Clive Owen, who isn’t that different here from what he was like in Sin City.
But Clive Owen is Clive Owen, and is watchable in almost every single thing he does. He plays the part with the requisite world-weariness/Bugs Bunny characterisation that you’d expect from him and for the material.
It’s not the brainiest way to spend 80 minutes, and it’s only for those with a high tolerance for gunplay, senseless violence and idiotic plots. And it’s got Monica Bellucci, so, you know, it’s never a loss.
7 times I laughed with it, then laughed at it, then with it again out of 10
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“Guns don't kill people. But they sure help.” – Shoot ‘Em Up.
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