Just the Ticket #143: Shoot 'Em Up (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Forty Year Old Virgin

Happy Birthday to me, Ticketholders!

Since I'm going to review the Midnight Run franchise later this month, and Shoot 'Em Up is the List Lookback selection for this month (a movie that, spoilers, I have fond memories of), and today is Friday and my birthday, I'm giving myself an awesome movie for the Big Four-Oh.

What I really want for my birthday (besides a big paycheck, a ReMarkable tablet, a new phone, a portable vacuum cleaner, and a new electric shaver) is for you to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, shoot some neon profanity into the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help me stock up on raw carrots, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my baby-saving content.

Shoot 'Em Up is a 2007 one-man-army action film directed by Michael Davis. His is a name most wouldn't know without research, but most of his filmography is writing credits, including Charles Band's Prehysteria! trilogy (which I will review in June) and the 90s-AF Double Dragon movie where Robert Patrick looked like Robert Van Winkle.

In the one-against-all spirit of action classics like Hard Boiled, First Blood Part II, and Last Man Standing (the Bruce Willis movie, not the Tim Allen sitcom), but more obviously inspired by the vivid, hyper-contrasted, mega-violent, absurdly sexual nature of Grindhouse cinema and Frank Miller film adaptations, (not to mention the sketch comedy violence of Looney Tunes cartoons because that's become a recurring element in my reviews lately), and itself being an of-its-time-but-timeless precursor to "really bad guy(s) fucked with the wrong nobody" revenge flicks like Taken, Wanted, Salt, John Wick, Nobody (obviously), and Gunpowder Milkshake, Shoot 'Em Up stars Clive Owen as Smith, a carrot-chewing, one-liner-spewing, Domme-screwing, badass gunman who happens to be sitting at the wrong bus stop at the right time to witness a bunch of thugs (including one who, I swear, walked level in a Dutch angle shot) chase down a pregnant woman who looks like April O'Neil (played by Canadian multimedia personality, actress, film professor, and Beverly Cleary-themed potato chip, Ramona Pringle). He engages the goons (and their boss, Hertz, played by Sideways star Paul Giamatti, whom I hated between the release of that film and this one because Sideways) in some intentionally hyper-choreographed, frenetically edited, dripping-with-cool gunplay...while successfully delivering her too-big-and-Hollywood-clean baby, who is noticeably smaller and plastic-looking (but not on an American Sniper baby level) in scenes that would make a focus group say "hooker-nuns, cursing, pornography, and murder are fine, but I can't handle someone holding a gun and a real baby!"

And that's the basic idea of the movie: take the low-budget, SyFy shark movie approach to gunfights (i.e. have them be where they would not normally be, crossed with things that they are not) but put a smattering of that Crank stank on it to make it as extreme as it is cool (including a sequence where he fights off a trained private army while having sex with a breast-feeding prostitute, played by Monica Bellucci).

Occasionally, the plot (yes, there is one), and the awkwardly inserted expositions of who Smith and Hertz are, utterly stop the flow of the movie, Bellucci's line delivery can be one-note and stilted, and the green screen effects in the finale are laughable in comparison to the relative groundedness of the rest of the movie. But Shoot 'Em Up is a hell of a fun ride from start to finish that wears its inspirations like million-dollar tattoos, innovates like a tech genius with memberships to the NRA and Hobby Lobby, and leaves all subtlety on the cutting room floor.

Despite having one of the lower aggregate ratings among my List Lookback selections (66.5%), Shoot 'Em Up was one of the movies that I wanted to talk about the most, and for good reason. It's an imperfect, underrated masterpiece that hearkens back to the days when action movies were action movies while being of its time in all the best and most identifiable ways and helping to usher in the non-superhero, non-sci-fi, non-horror, everyman action movies of today.

A-

Please remember to honor my wish list and Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, shoot some neon profanity into the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help me stock up on raw carrots, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my baby-saving content.

Ticketmaster,

Looking Back,

Getting Older,

Shooting Out.