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Shoot 'Em Up
(R)

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Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) fends off the bad guys.
This stylish, run & gun action movie looks like a graphic novel and plays like some drunken Hong Kong action flick with a few over-the-top James Bond-style kills folded in for sport. Witnessing a gunman shadow a pregnant woman down a dark secluded alley, nonchalant, carrot-chomping mystery man Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) reluctantly gets off his bus bench to intervene. The absurd level of carnage begins with a carrot stick rammed through the back of a head, punctuated by the corny catchphrase, "Eat your vegetables."

Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti) zeroes in on the baby.
During the escalating garage shootout that follows, the enigmatic Smith proves himself an experienced marksman against a band of heavily armed assassins. While Smith ricochets, rolls, careens and slides through oil slicks to pick off the assailants, the petrified mother gives birth. It concludes with the baby's umbilical chord being shot apart. This is the first of many sequences of thrilling live-action cartoon violence.

Injured Mr. Smith (Owen) uses a little ingenuity to fire back.

Smith earns the animosity of the head hitman, aptly named Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti). As played by the incomparable Giamatti, Hertz is a scenery-chewing sociopath whose bookish family man demeanor betrays his violent perversity.

"You know why a gun is better than a wife?" he sneers. "You can put a silencer on a gun." For the remainder of Shoot 'Em Up, Smith -- joined by prostitute wet nurse Donna (Monica Belluci) -- keeps himself and the baby out of Hertz's sniper scopes while trying to solve the mystery of why they're after him in the first place.

With its cold urban-dystopia cinematography, Shoot 'Em Up briefly calls to mind the look of Sin City. The over-the-top stunts, meanwhile, are marked by precision shooting while sliding, rappelling, or -- in the film's most memorable interlude -- while rolling around in the throes of passionate sex. It's the brand of humorous, inventive gunplay you usually have to go to the Hong Kong video aisle for. This exaggerated, high-caliber shoot-'em-up from writer-director Michael Davis (Monster Man) is a veritable Hong Kong action flick, only undubbed and unsubtitled.

By Rob. Walton

photo credit: James Dittiger/New Line Cinema

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