ShouldBeOK.com

 Go to official movie website for trailers: http://www.shootemupmovie.com/

OK OK OK OK OK  (4 out of 5)

Shoot ‘em up, down, left and right, backwards, flying, and the list goes on…

By “Tarface”

OK, this is my first blog posting and rather than explain that further, here’s my review of the newly released movie “Shoot ‘Em Up” starring Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci.

First let me say that this movie is awesome. Better yet: This movie Should Be MORE THAN Ok, (considering the name of the site this is posted to.) What a refreshing new look at … gun fights. My ongoing feeling throughout this movie was “The commanding order while this film was being made must’ve been: let us find completely different, all new ways of killing people with guns.”

Like the masked magician who unveiled the inner workings of many popular magic tricks [Fox TV], this movie will force all movie-makers to now go beyond the norm, to search further for new, imaginative, creative ways to … apply the trade of gun slinging.

OK, ok… Yes, you will quickly notice that most situations in the movie are, to say the least, highly improbable but nevertheless, it’s darn good viewing.

The story tells of a lone-wolf of sorts, a British ex-championship marksman, clearly later trained by Special Forces, now living in anonymity, hiding away in an abandoned warehouse in a U.S. city. We will know him only as “Smith” (Clive Owen).

The movie starts off (don’t worry, I won’t unveil anything important but the basic plot) with Smith sitting on a bench waiting for a bus in an abandoned warehouse district of the city. Action starts to take place around him as a pregnant woman is pursued by a “very bad guy”. To make a long story short, Smith’s conscious forces him to defend the woman and later to defend her baby while an ARMY of men led by “Hertz” (Paul Giamatti) try to kill him and the baby. If you want to know why they want to kill the baby so badly, you will have to go see the movie…

So why do I love this movie? Because it was ORIGINAL! Do you know how often I go to movies and WISH to see something original? I went to Shoot ‘Em Up expecting just that: another shoot ‘em up movie. This movie went far beyond my expectations. Guns were used in all new ways, mounted, un-mounted, right-handed, left-handed, both hands, no hands, broken hands and even with a CARROT! Seriously, a carrot. Cut off fingers, broken fingers, strings, I’m probably forgetting many more of the uses but suffice it to say that much thought was given to how they used the guns and how much it had to be NOT like all the other shoot ‘em ups.

There were plenty of times in the movie I told myself “Wow, that’s cool!” or I just laughed at how painful that last image looked, and as many times as that, I told myself “There’s no way the baby could have survived the G-force of that maneuver in real life”, but who cares! Once you accept that assumption – that the baby won’t have shaken baby syndrome by the end of the movie, if he even survives some of the high speed chases, jumps, and grabs, then most of the rest of the movie works fine.

Paul Giamatti is also a wonderful psychotic bad guy with a fun twist of humor, way too much self-confidence, a serious mean streak which gives him just enough of an edge to be practically likeable. It’s a far cry from the sweet, nice-guy we know from many of his previous movies but perhaps that’s what was fun. Throughout the movie, he gets phone calls from his wife to whom he must explain his tardiness at arriving home as his “business” is taking longer than planned. It’s not done too often, it’s not done in a cheesy way, and it’s done at just the right times to make it funny yet unobtrusive.

Monica Bellucci plays the part of Donna Quintano, a prostitute. Yep, it’s that simple. They needed a woman because what would a movie be without a damsel in distress, and so they took this 42 year old Italian bombshell (sorry guys, she’s married to French actor Vincent Cassel) and tossed her in there as eye candy. She doesn’t really do much, or bring much to the movie other than …. well…. eye candy. But HEY! Good for Clive Owen! He gets to make out with her, not to discount the torrid love-making scene (yes, this movie is rated R for very good reasons) which climaxes (pun INtended) in yet another original shoot out.

Rumor has it that Clive Owen does all his own stunts. Well, I have no idea, I wasn’t there when the movie was made but most if not all of the stunts certainly look like him. Of course, one can unfortunately tell that a shoot out scene done while falling through the sky from a plane with many bad guys right behind him was done in front of a green screen, of course, no surprise but I did find the “feeling” of the scene to be sub-par. It looked TOO fake. Oh well! How often do you get to see a bunch of grown men shooting it out at terminal velocity anyway?

Some minor things that bothered me were some wide-angle shots in the streets of the city. At one point, 75% of the C.N. tower in Toronto (that’s in Canada people, eh.) is visible and since the movie was supposed to be in a non-descript U.S. city, that bugged me, as did the Ontario (that’s also in Canada, eh.) license plates during a prolonged car chase. Of course, I lived in Toronto for a while at one point in my life, so I recognize these things whereas most would not, I guess. At one point, an extreme close-up of one of the guns shows it’s manufacturer to be “Hammerson Guns, Ft. Lauderdale, USA” and minutes later Smith is sneaking about the Hammerson factory. Well the movie definitely wasn’t in Ft Lauderdale, and only minutes earlier seemed to be in Toronto, but was supposed to be in the U.S. and so all this “locale confusion” bugged me. Little details, nothing big, but I noticed and it bugged me. You may not have noticed but now that you’ve read this, when you see the movie, you WILL notice.

But the movie is about guns. Some say: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Well in this movie, Smith kills what well may be the most people I have ever seen killed by gun in a single movie. Amazingly, he does it convincingly! Once you accept the premise that he is/was a championship marksmen later taken into and trained by the Special Forces (or was he?…), his uncanny amount of one-shot kills seems normal.

Clive Owen delivers, as does Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci does exactly what was expected from her. The movie delivers exactly what it says and although there will be no Academy Award nominations for these actors, it’s a very fast-paced, noisy, violent, sexy, movie with a few plot twists that will give you little time to catch your breath between shoot outs.

Just some parting words: carrots play a big role in this movie. I had never thought of a carrot as used in this movie. You too will never look at a carrot the same way, ever again after you see this movie. And NO, I don’t mean “that way”.

OK OK OK OK I give it 4 out of 5 “OK”s because it was just so darn fun.

I hope you enjoy this movie as much as I did. I welcome any and all your comments as well as any corrections to anything I may have posted erroneously.