Shoot Em' Up <br /><br />Are you tired of all those heartless, senseless, generic and cliché, action-driven Hollywood films? That honor style and blood over character and plot? Well then I have news for you: don't go see "Shoot Em' Up".<br /><br />But it's a shame that you won't. The film whose trailer I pointed to and said 'that's what film-making has come to these days; all attitude and no heart', turns out to be the most fun and riotous satire I've seen in a long time. "Shoot Em' Up"--a relentless, simultaneously energizing and hilarious movie--is a surprisingly smart confection. As conceived by writer-director Mike Davis its an over-the-top send-up of every action film ever made; a wink and a nod (as well as a parody of) to the bloody overkill of "Die Hard" and "Rambo", the gleeful excitement and charm of "Indiana Jones", the cornball abandon of "James Bond", the who cares of "North by Northwest", the heroic terseness and ease of "Bourne", the ultra-stylized and preposterous overdrive of "The Matrix" or anything ever made by John Woo (particularly a love for "Hard-Boiled"), and even in one scene the splendid lunacy of "Raising Arizona".<br /><br />The whole project, through controlled chaos and witty abandon, is made as a single, continuous in-joke. As in most films that take themselves too seriously, Clive Owen's hero (enigmatically titled Mr. Smith) quite literally never stops shooting. He shoots while having sex, he shoots while in the middle of free-fall, he shoots the umbilical cord off of a baby, he shoots with his fingers broken. Davis takes over-the-top to a whole new level; poking fun at action movies by taking their ridiculousness to its brinking point.<br /><br />Everything is done with an intentional preposterousness. For no reason Smith takes the baby of a dead woman (whom he helped deliver...in a frenetic shootout nonetheless) and decides to protect the infant from Paul Giamatti (dropping his nice-guy smugness, and superbly playing his diabolical villain with maniacal glee) and his army of goonish gunmen (why are they even after it?). For no reason, Smith just happens to be the world's greatest gunslinger (he doesn't miss; he doesn't break a sweat...in fact the whole movie Owen plays Smith as the ultimate joke: with a straight face. Same expression for killing, sex, talking, anything).<br /><br />The enigmatic coincidence of it all is only part of the film's joy (and when it begins to explain some its elements, that's where it goes wrong). Mostly its about the cartoonish, endlessly inventive shootouts; each staged with more ludicrous precision than the last. Its both funny and exceptionally filmed; the dialogue another homage to the stupidity of action films (among Smith's witty remarks: "Eat your vegetables" he laments after impaling a man with a carrot).<br /><br />And what is an action film without (besides a huge body count; a beautiful woman who does no more than look hot and talk sexy--kudos to Monica Bellucci) quirks for its hero? Smith is all caricature with a few cartoony peeves. For one he hates a lot of things (including bad drivers), but more importantly he has a fondness for carrots ("they make your eyesight better" he growls); he even turns them into weapons.<br /><br />"Shoot Em' Up" does all that it can to be every kind of action-movie. And it succeeds; staging endless fight after fight in every way imaginable, never repeating itself and quite literally ending with a bang. 9/10 <br /><br />"I hate ponytails. They don't make you look hip, young or cool"- Shoot 'Em Up