"It gets hotter the more times it's fired."
Michael Davis, what the fuck man?! For years you've been wallowing in anonymity, playing it low and quiet by making everybody think you were just another throw away crap writer on shit like Charles Band kiddie productions and that colon blocking Double Dragon movie, then you do something like Shoot 'Em Up?! Forget that I'd actually heard some halfway decent praise for Monster Man before, after seeing this shining opus of Looney Tunes run & gun parody I'm actually tempted to bump your "redneck monster truck serial killer" movie up on my viewing list! Wow. I guess Shoot 'Em Up just goes to prove that today's $10/hour b-movie writer very well can become tomorrow's next cult action movie fan favorite... not that that means he's going to be making much more money, but at least the man earned some legitimate names to star in his flick and he got it pushed into a national theatrical release!
The art of film parody is a tightrope act. You can either choose to go all out and try to make a movie that's pure slapstick, straight forward comedy, like the Airplane or The Naked Gun flicks, or you can go for a more subtle parody by making a movie that less-than-insightful audiences will mistake for being another installment of the genre you're making fun of, while the more cerebral viewers will understand the underlying ironic humor beneath all of the muzzle flashes and piling bodies. The former, despite requiring less thought, is obviously not as easy to pull off as most people would think (Epic Movie and Date Movie, go sit in the corner and think about what you've done), while the latter is five times harder. Somehow Beanstalk and 100 Girls prepared Michael Davis for this. Originally written right around the time that the self-proclaimed "Trenchcoat Mafia" decided to shoot their pimply faced teen angst into the history books, Shoot 'Em Up was, ironically enough, shot down by all of Hollywood. Fortunately all that "Columbine" hub-bub eventually cooled off enough that writer-director Davis was able to impress just enough people with his ideas that he could get the movie made... lucky for us he did so before that import Tomb Raider wanna-be flipped his shit and decided to buck the Asian stereotype of the good little math whiz and opted instead to be remembered as a whiny little bitch of a guy who hated trust fund brats. Had he been forced to wait another year to make this movie happen, it probably would've been thrown on the proverbial back burners for another decade.
Shoot 'Em Up starts off as a simple enough tale: the mysterious, carrot-chomping, pet peev riddled, god of guns known as Mr. Smith (Clive Owen at his cool and collect bad-assedness) is just waiting for a bus one night when he falls into one of those "only in the movies" wrong-place-at-the-right-time scenarios. A pregnant woman on the run from a depraved troll of a savant named Hertz (sickeningly perfect Paul Giamatti) just happens to find herself being chased down by her pursuers within (fire)arm's reach of our hero. While fending off an army of hench-goons (he literally kills eleven guys in the first 5 minutes), Smith delivers the baby (shooting through the umbilical cord) and escapes with the kid intact. Hooking up with his fetish friend D.Q. (she lets guys nurse on her mommy juice for a price) so he can keep the kid fed and happy, Smith now needs to uncover just what it is that Hertz has up his sleeve and what it has to do with an up and coming presidential candidate, gun control laws, Smith's mysterious "tragic hero" past, a big time firearms manufacturer, stem cell experimentation, a baby harvesting operation, and a secret service agent who loves his gun in unnatural ways usually only reserved for the NRA's "Lifetime & Beyond" membership levels. Some people might think the movie starts to stumble under the weight of its own cluster fuck, but if you find you can't handle the plot twists and story elements, just switch off your logic chip and count the bodies!
When I initially rented Crank, I realized that I'd missed what could've been a pisser of a theater going experience. When I first saw the trailers for Shoot 'Em Up, I knew I'd be adding another ticket stub to the collection... oh please, like you don't have a drawer full of stubs for every movie you've gone to since the 5th grade! Between this and Children of Men (ironically enough another movie with Owen running around trying to keep a baby from getting shot), I've become an increasingly bigger fan of Clive Owen over the last year. I actually considering going to see Elizabeth: the Golden Age because he's in it! I didn't, mind you, but I considered it, and that's saying something in and of itzelf. Yeah, there's a 'z' there, you read right. What? Anyway, Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Michael Davis, and to a lesser extent, for you guys just looking for a piece of ass to stare at, Monica Bellucci. Owen's one-liners can get annoying around the movie's mid-section, Bellucci's accent bothers me, and Giamatti gets to the point where he's just too gross to look at, but all of the action, the over-the-top absurdity, the movie's positive message about gun control, the inclusion of every '80s NRA boner flick cliché, a killer soundtrack, cringe worthy Gestapo-like torture moments, a phe-fucking-nomenal car chase scene, the coolest damn aerial action sequence since Crank, and the general enjoyment that comes from your stomach muscles hurting because you've been laughing at the fact that a man was just killed with a carrot, that all makes the trip worthwhile. Besides, when a movie can actually make me sit through an entire playing of "Kick Start My Heart" without feeling bad that I'm listening to a Motley Crüe song, that's just magic.
Moral of the Story: Paul Giamatti loves him some corpse titty.
