“Shoot ’Em Up” is truth in advertising.
Offering little more than what the title promises — but giving that to you in spades — the shallow ambitions of this tight and lively throwaway actioner seem sufficient largely because of the leading presence of Clive Owen, the thinking person’s hunk.
Not unlike his turn in last year’s far more purposeful “Children of Men,” the bright British brute is again out to save a wee one in mortal peril. In this case, it’s a newborn baby soon to be named Oliver. Owen’s mystery stranger character Mr. Smith has just delivered him from the womb of a soon-to-be-dead mother (Ramona Pringle) amid a hail of bullets and blood in the dark urban film’s harrowing, wickedly comic opening sequence.
Luckily for little Oliver and the gorgeous lactating prostitute enlisted as his wet nurse (Monica Bellucci), Mr. Smith is a highly skilled, down-and-dirty killing machine who also seems to have a heart of gold. That he also happens to munch on whole carrots and then creatively use them as weapons of last resort only adds to his inscrutability.
The root vegetable motif does, however, help us to understand the justification for this picture’s outrageous storyline.In so much as the carrots evoke Bugs Bunny’s Loony Tunes, we are being told to view the silly premise and the over-the-top scenes of violence – including one in which some 50 men are mowed down in something like five minutes by our lone ranger protagonist — as cartoonish satire.
So check your brain with the multiplex’s ticket taker and don’t bother trying to buy into director-writer Michael Davis’ thin conceit here. It only takes you out of the flow of the hard-core gunplay and nearly ruins the perversity of it all. The plot: A terminally ill United States senator, who also happens to be running for president on a gun control platform, is surreptitiously renting women to bear his offspring (including Oliver) so that he can harvest their stem cells to cure him.
Hired gun Paul Giamatti is buoyantly, deliciously sick and wrong as Mr. Smith’s offbeat antagonist. His Mr. Hertz is trying first to kill the baby and then retrieve it — darned if I could keep the character motivations or the political ones straight.
OK, so there’s a secretly dying presidential candidate with a diabolical baby-making lab. Where’s the Washington press corps or a script editor when you need one?
But at least we have Clive Owen. He manages to wink at the audience knowingly while still taking this foolishness seriously enough to make us want to root for him. He’s all man and eminently watchable even in well-choreographed ca-ca like “Shoot ’Em Up.”
‘Shoot ’Em Up’
***
Starring: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci
Director: Michael Davis
Rated R for pervasive strong bloody violence, sexuality and some language
Running time: 87 minutes
