"Shoot 'em Up" misfires

"Shoot 'em Up" looks like something you would more likely encounter in the "Million Dollar Midway" at Dave & Buster's than in the local DVD rental store. You stand in front of a big hi-res screen with this electronic gun in your hand, mowing down action figures as they appear on the screen. Once you dispatch a bunch of baddies in one scenario, the machine spits out the requisite number of tickets and you move onto the next scenario. In fact, the game might even be preferable because then you could participate in the carnage instead of just watching it. In fact, the only drawback to this option is that you would be denied the opportunity to see long, cool Clive Owen, a relentless, laconic knight in grubby armour. You might also be denied the opportunity of dealing death by carrot, which Owen's character here, Mr. Smith, is quite proficient at.

I'm probably going to spend more time describing the movie's storyline here than writer-director Michael Davis spent conceiving it. Nah, I'm not going to tell you the storyline, just the set-up because the storyline is lame. Mr. Smith is sitting on a bench at a bus stop in one of those cities where, at times that are convenient for scenes such as this, no "bystanders" are anywhere within a five-mile radius. Smith sees an obviously pregnant woman (Ramona Pringle) struggling down the street. Just then a car careens around a corner menacingly and crashes into a parked vehicle. A gunman gets out of the wrecked car and starts out after the woman. Being the relentless, laconic knight in grubby armour that he is, Mr. Smith takes after the guy and dispatches him with a carrot (deal with it). At that point, one million (give or take) expressionless gunmen led by a fanatic known only as Hertz (Paul Giamatti, who is going out of his way to make sure he doesn't get typecast) appear on the scene. All this takes, I dunno, perhaps two, three at the most, minutes. The rest of the film's 86-minute running time is a series of gunfights in all kinds of places, in all kinds of situations.

Mr. Smith shoots baddies as he delivers the woman's baby (spent cartridges bounce off her tummy and she shoots off the umbilical chord), as he leaps and free falls from a jetliner and even as he has sex with DQ (Monica Bellucci), a lactating prostitute Smith recruits to help him care for the baby after its mother is killed.

If you think, from the above paragraph, that "Shoot 'em Up," should be seen as a parody, you're probably on to something. Unfortunately, Davis doesn't see it this way. The movie does have its own brand of humor, to be sure--I loved the scene where Smith gets the child a camouflage suit made of Kevlar and another one in which Smith crashes his BMW head on with a van, flies through the windshield of both the Beamer and the van, lands in the back of the van and kills all its occupants. I also lost count of the number of times Smith slides across a floor firing his pistol or in how many positions in slid and fired. But Giamatti, who could have really milked Hertz for laughs, plays him humorlessly bizarre instead and the running gag involving the incessant phone calls from Hertz's wife doesn't have a good payoff.

Is there a point to all this? I guess it's beware of relentless, laconic knights in grubby armour and armed with a carrot.

This DVD will appeal to those who think character development is a complete waste of time and determines the value of a movie by dividing the total number of rounds fired by the cost of the rental. You know who you are but please don't stop by if you see me watching a Mavs game from the bar at Dave & Buster's.

Grade: D