Alright so I finally saw this gem of a movie. Here are my thoughts.
SHOOT EM UP
9.5/10
In an age when action movies seem to be everywhere, it is very easy for some to be completely ignored. And the problem with Shoot em up, like it's video-game obsessed predecessor Crank, is that it is so ridiculously understated that a lot of people will completely miss the point.
Because, you see, Shoot em up works on two different levels. There is indeed plenty of mindless sex and violence to go around. Yes, people say ****, yes you get to see some "nice knockers", and yes people do in fact get shot up. If you said Shoot em up was nothing more than a mindless 2 hours of action then you are dead-on, but you are also very, very wrong.
What a lot of people forget is that what an action movie needs to be so good at entertaining you is a hell of a lot of creativity. This movie takes its cards from classics like Hard Boiled and builds on to them with some of the most unique fight scenes I've seen in a long time. Carrots are stabbed in people's eyes, Clive Owen pulls on about a thousand levers that are connected to about a thousand different semi-automatics and shotguns, and there are so many beautiful scenes in this movie that a lot of people could just take for granted, which I hope they don't.
What Crank did not even a year ago was, like it or not, usher in a completely new era of action films. That movie played by all the rules of conventional action films, but also toyed with them in tiny, minute ways. Shoot-em-up does the same thing here. Our hero, villain and love-interest could have all been incredibly stale characters...they are, after all, all archtypes. But Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Belluci all give their characters something unique. In fact, when you look at these actors and you start to realize how awesome their resumes are it is odd that they would do a movie like this, or what the casting director was thinking when he gave them the roles. But not even five minutes through and it's allready pretty obvious...these are some of the best understated performances I've seen in a while and they help ground what would otherwise be a completely ludicrous film. And, aside from the characters and the actors that play them, on the whole Shoot em up feels like a very run-of-the-mill plot. There is nothing particularly new about it, you've probably seen over a hundred action movies just like it and that's what the people behind the movie are counting on. It is in the little details that they toy with the cliches of action films and create something new that feels like a very nice, clean breath of fresh air. They mess with the theme most action movies have where the good-guy and bad-guy play a game of cat and mouse; the twist ending; the way guns are glorified; even the obvious solution to a car chase is no longer that obvious.
Now I know that as of now Shoot em up has not done very well at the box office, which is sad but really I didn't expect it to. Because on the surface Shoot em up is exactly like every other action movie out there. But underneath that surface is something unique: art.
