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Lactating HookersAnd other low points of Shoot 'Em Up.

By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Sept. 7, 2007, at 3:45 PM ET
Clive Owen in "Shoot 'Em Up." Click image to expand.

I know I'm typing myself as hopelessly unhip by not rolling with the amoral "fun" of Shoot 'Em Up (New Line), a grubby little action spoof with a thrown-together script, a mystifyingly top-notch cast, and a body count to rival the war in Afghanistan. After all, it's not meant to be taken seriously! It's a parody of sadism-as-entertainment, not an example of it! I get it that as soon as graphic novels or video games are invoked as references in a movie, we're all supposed to chuckle indulgently at the content. But I refuse to relinquish my right to be repelled by this nasty piece of work.

Not least among Shoot 'Em Up's aesthetic crimes is its barefaced (not to mention tediously redundant) larceny from a truly great work of popular art: Warner Bros. cartoons. Our nihilistic hero, Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), is munching on a carrot, Bugs Bunny-style, when a pregnant woman rushes by, pursued by an armed man. During the ensuing gun battle, Mr. Smith manages to kill a man using only a carrot, deliver the baby, sever the umbilical cord with a bullet, and carry the woman and child to safety. But the mother is killed by a member of the assassin's gang, leaving Smith responsible for the newborn. That's where your lactating hooker comes in.

Donna Quintana, a bizarre concoction of a character played (or should I say, phonetically sounded out) by Monica Bellucci, spends her days in a specialty brothel suckling middle-aged pervs (how her milk came in at all will be explained later, in some maudlin downtime between gunfights). She's conscripted as a wet nurse for the infant, whom they name Oliver, after Oliver Twist. But, like that orphan, the poor lad's troubles are far from over. As it turns out, a crazed gangster/businessman named Hertz (Paul Giamatti) is bent on killing the baby in order to protect the secret of a dying U.S. senator who's breeding babies for a last-ditch marrow transplant. These goings-on are intimately, yet incoherently, connected with the gun lobby, thus allowing Mr. Smith the unique opportunity to advocate for gun control between pauses to reload.

Believe it or not, that plot sounded better on paper than it reads on the screen. If all of this nonsense was played as a genre pastiche—like the Airplane! movies, say, or last year's delightful Hot Fuzz—Shoot 'Em Up might have been lighthearted in tone. Instead, Michael Davis, who seems to have scribbled the dialogue with one hand while operating a gaming joystick with the other, hides behind some vague notion of camp as a pretext to imagine awful things happening to people's bodies. Innumerable (and indistinguishable) baddies are eviscerated, tortured, thrown out of planes, and impaled on root vegetables—but hey, it's all in the name of protecting a baby. The way the infant's helplessness is milked indiscriminately for tears, laughs, or thrills, according to the plot's demands, is another of the movie's moral low points.

Clive Owen is making a career of delivering newborns and smuggling them to safety against impossible odds—he performed the same office in last year's sublime Children of Men, a work so profoundly divergent from Shoot 'Em Up that it seems misleading to call them both "movies." Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci—all fine actors at the peak of hireability—must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud (which gets extra points off for doing the lamest job ever of trying to pass off Toronto as New York. Why not just set the movie in Canada and be done with it?).

Davis has cited John Woo's cult classic Hardboiled (in which Chow Yun-Fat rescues a baby in the midst of a gunfight) as an influence, proving once again that watching cool movies is a less-than-sufficient apprenticeship for making cool movies. He would have done well to recruit script doctors from the participants in Slate's recent action-movie one-liner contest, who might have stepped in to prevent some of the worst pre- and post-gunshot wisecracks in recent memory: "He who leads from the rear takes it in the rear"; "Guns don't kill people … but they sure help"; and, perhaps most painfully for the Chuck Jones fans among us, "What's up, doc?"

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.
Still from Shoot 'Em Up by James Dittiger/New Line Cinema. All rights reserved.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I've read Ms. Stevens' review of Shoot 'Em Up about three times now, and I still can't figure out exactly why she disliked the movie. Apparently, any movie with a lactating hooker is bad ab initio. I am not a connoisseur of the harlot arts, but is lactation all that much poorer taste than the more routine activities in which hookers engage?

Certainly, there was an ample amount of blood, guts, and other viscous material. I can see how some reviewers could be less-than-enamored by this constant effusion of bodily fluids. But not Ms. Stevens. She would have no problem with the level of violence if it only were a lighthearted genre pastiche like Hot Fuzz. So, apparently, it was not the level of violence that was the problem, it is that the violence did not come with a requisite number of chuckles. Perhaps Ms. Stevens can enlighten us on an acceptable guts-to-giggle ratio.

Despite Ms. Stevens' tsk-tsking, Shoot 'Em Up is a very funny movie. Come on, a lactating hooker with the initials of DQ? The sad sack from Sideways as a sociopathic hitman? Clive Owen's Bugs Bunnyesque carrot shtick? That, my friends, is comic gold. This movie was as riddled with jokes as it was with bullets. I swear that the old lady in the theater next to me almost shot coke through her nasal passages because she was laughing so hard.

I'm inclined to suspect that Ms. Stevens may be the victim of too many earnest art movies. The kind with pouty progagonists and a soundtrack chock-full of bands you've never heard of. Truth be told, I like those movies, but a steady diet of them leads to a certain impairment of the humor response. Regardless of the reason, Ms. Stevens doesn't know from funny.

Additionally, I am confused that, on one hand, Ms. Stevens complains that Shoot 'Em Up is not a genre pastiche and, on the other hand, complain that it steals so much from other movies. I am not ashamed to admit that I had to look up the definition of "pastiche". I suggest that Ms. Stevens do the same.

--Duck Duck Goose

(To reply, click here.)

It's tough to find a label that's sticky enough for the bloody mess which Shoot 'Em Up is but I found it thoughtful in a way that is hard to describe. Perhaps 'Reservoir Dogs Go to Washington and Bump Into Mr. Smith on the Way' ?

It's like trying to put 10 pounds of bizarre into a 5 pound sack. But hey, the news just yesterday said that the guy from the Nu Metal band Korn found God a couple of years ago and started over again so maybe even though truth is stranger than fiction the gap is closing. When the smoke clears it's a nice family values story. When is the sequel?

--wmccomninel

(To reply, click here.)

(9/13)

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