Shakespeare once attempted to appease the masses with a comedy that would satisfy their simpleton cravings for vaudevillian silliness and tightly knit happy endings. Although Michael Davis’ new action parody “Shoot ’Em Up” isn’t as fittingly named as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” any discrepancies regarding the film’s purpose are clarified once AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It” blares shamelessly through the on-screen carnage. As the film’s main villain so blatantly puts it, “What’s more fun than watching violence?”
The film springs opens like a tightly coiled jack-in-the-box when “Mr. Smith,” a menacing figure pluming with hokey shadows and played with deadpan delivery by Clive Owen, spies a pregnant damsel being chased by your stereotypical baddies. Since Smith was merely waiting for a bus to nowhere and fondling the most threatening vegetable I’ve ever seen (more on that later), he stalks them to a deserted warehouse where—with an attack style that rivals the shoe-throwing guy from “Austin Powers”—he stabs an unfortunate evildoer through the eyeball with a carrot, not forgetting to add irony to injury by declaring that “carrots are good for your eyesight.”
In the orgy of gun stunts that follow, our Bugs Bunny Bandit manages to successfully feign midwifery for a laboring woman while mowing down disposable henchman like a child hosing ants down a driveway of juvenile genocide.
Eventually, Paul Giamatti arrives as the head honcho named Hertz—a Grinch-like rat of a man whose villainy is irrefutable long before his necrophilia tendencies are revealed. By then, it’s hard to tell which are more copious: camera shots or poorly aimed bullets. The spectacle rages on and yada, yada, yada, the mother happens to get shot in the head. This prompts Owen’s character to do what he does best (See “Children of Men”) and save the babe by cradling him like a football in diapers and flinging them both into a fabulous action farce.
The rest of the film whirls like a bullet-spun merry-go-round, revolving around one highly coveted bouncing baby boy who, literally, had to be made of rubber to survive such rag-doll treatment. Smith partners up with a trusty hooker (Monica Belluci) whose name is less important than her creamy Italian accent and lactating mammary glands.
Like a ménagé trois of “Snakes on a Plane,” James Bond and the cast of Looney Tunes, the plot for “Shoot ’Em Up” quickly melts into a stew of genre clichés and intentionally subordinates all of those bothersome character backgrounds and their emotional development to 83 minutes of Xbox violence, booby-trap ingenuity that rivals “Home Alone” and even some fornication fight scenes.
Evaluating this new breed of “spooferies” like “Shoot ’Em Up” and “Hot Fuzz” (its overrated British counterpart) is no simple task. Although this film provides several guilty chuckles at the videogamer’s expense, it’s still nothing more than a conceptual satire that relies too heavily on ridiculously overblown action and nauseating quips instead of witty scripts and rich characters that have helped other masterpieces like “Airplane” and “Pulp Fiction” transcend their genre-mocking genre. Instead, “Shoot ’Em Up” is just another one-and-done guilty pleasure with little lasting appeal. It may be “as we like it,” but it’s really just much ado about nothing.
