Shoot ‘Em Up (2007)

Written by Nick Da Costa | Saturday, April 5, 2008 |

No mission acceptance, no ennui or social malaise, just the classic lone hero, stubble, trench and….carrot, sitting at a bus stop, a pregnant woman in trouble and with a split decision bullet we’re propelled into the first of Shoot-Em-Up’s perfectly choreographed gun battles. Unfortunately it’s this perfection that could be its biggest flaw.

Clive Owen was made to play this part. After prep work in Sin City, he makes Mr Smith an amalgamation of every 80s gun hero, and he makes it work well amidst the torrent of one-liners that litter the film. Essentially, that’s all the film is beyond the action. Ignore the story, as it’s pure politics, corruption MacGuffin.

Not that this is the flaw I talked about. No, it’s not that most of the exhilarating action sequences are absurd or that the dialogue and acting are both clichéd, corny and over-egged, especially from Giamatti, playing the bad guy and revelling in throwaway lines like, ‘Nice knockers’ to the corpse of a pregnant woman. The film knows that, the clue is in the title, itself a stripped down, hardboiled expression of the B-movie which was always film dialogue and action stripped down to its essential elements.

The problem with this film is it’s almost too perfect in its construction even in the moments where it‘s meant to look sloppy. As a paean to the 80s action movie, no criticism can be levelled at it. Not since early John Woo have we seen action like this in commercial American cinema. The screen pops with the kind of whooping ingenuity involved in constructing a jump off a bridge, guns blazing through a car sunroof, into the seat and straight into a car chase or an Uzi marionette fire fight that has to be seen to be believed.

Unfortunately, it can become a little tiring when it feels that every movement, every turn taken is done with precision, every object or enemy target is right where it needs to be and the hero will always make it out alive simply because the film is a tribute to the invulnerability of the archetypal hardboiled hero. Certainly it’s a visceral experience, and worthy for that fact alone, but as a film, it’s an ungainly, sometimes stalling experience as the story meanders from set piece to heightened set piece, from sex scene shoot-out to skydive shoot-out.

Unfortunately for writer/director Michael Davis, in his attempts to make the ultimate action film, he’s come closer to the perfect silver screen videogame, nailing composition, squeezing the maximum from a low budget, and sublime action, but losing a little too much soul in the process.

• Sin City (2005)

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