Coolhand
Spiff's Stunt Double
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2006
- Messages
- 495
Short version: It’s Looney Tunes. With guns. And hookers.
Long Version:
Here Be Spoilers! Enter At Thy Own Risk!
To start this review, I’d like to take a quick moment to interview the starts of Shoot Em Up, namely Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci. Hi guys, glad you could make it. Now, I know that the basic plot revolves around Clive protecting a newborn baby and Paul trying to kill it, but could you please describe the characters you play in the movie in as much detail as possible?
Clive Owen: Well, I’m the good guy.
Paul Giamatti: I’m the bad guy.
Monica Bellucci: And I’m the breasts.
Okay…uh, thanks for the…in depth discussion there. I don’t suppose you could furnish a little more depth to the role your characters play in the movie? Maybe give us their motivations or emotional tapestries?
Clive Owen: Well, I shoot bad people.
Paul Giamatti: I shoot good people.
Monica Bellucci: I have breasts.
Oookay….thanks, you can go now.
Now based on the above interview, you’ve probably already concluded that Shoot Em Up is about as awful as a Friday Night Popcorn flick can get and should be avoided like an unwelcome dose of the Ebola virus.
Man, you are so wrong. This movie is awesome in a way that few movies can ever be.
Why?
Well forget Space Jam, or Looney Tunes: Back in Action. THIS is the definitive Looney Tines live action movie. Seriously. It’s Bugs Vs Elmer Fudd. And it knows it.
Clive Owen takes the role of Bugs Bunny, right down to the habitual carrot chomping and the ability to defy the laws of physics whilst outwitting pursuers. He lives in a warehouse with a rodent-operated lock (yes, you read that right) and uses bullets to solve problems. Not just in a shooting people kind of way, although he does manage quite a lot of that. No, this is a guy who uses bullets for EVERYTHING, from cutting the umbilical cord of the baby he saves in the first scene to pushing a playground roundabout for said baby. He probably cooks food with bullets and completes his tax returns with bullets. And when he runs out of bullets, he uses the carrot. This movie has more carrot related fatalities than most movies have total body counts.
Paul Giamatti is in the Elmer Fudd role, the frustrated, portly pursuer of Clive’s Bugs, even at one point uttering the line “You Wascally Wabbit” after one of Owen’s ingenious gun-blazing escapes. He’s also utterly, utterly mental and evil in a way that’s almost a metaphysical experience. He’s like the god of unbalanced, scummy hit men. Witness the scene in the back of the car with him and a corpse that is both awfully vile and totally hilarious due to Giamatti’s facial acting. I dare you to watch it and not laugh.
And Monica Bellucci? Well, to put it bluntly, the only reason she’s in this movie is because Clive Owen needs boobs (for the baby, see?) Yes, this chick is basically there to be a pair of breasts, which shows a degree of refreshing honesty from the film as why this kind of movie has a woman in it. I’m pretty certain that if the filmmakers could have somehow separated Bellucci from the rest of her body and just had a huge pair of disembodied breasts bouncing along behind Clive Owen, they’d have done that.
What about the movie itself? Well, this will sound utterly bizarre, but it’s actually a very witty film, despite having hardly any plot or dialogue. Witness the scene where Owen and Giamatti throw insults at each other via the use of bullets and a neon sign. Or the bit where he creates a distraction in a museum by walking up to a mother who’s just finished spanking her kid and promptly spanks her, much to the kid’s delight. Or the bit where Owen rigs up a surprise for the baddies using some string, a CCTV camera and some other stuff he found lying around in the gun factory...
Ah, and the action. The sweet, sweet action. I cannot emphasise enough how nice it is to have an action film where you can actually see what the frack is going on, where the action isn’t ruined by stupid camera shake and terrible close-ups. It makes me want to grab certain directors, strap them to a chair in-front of the screen, sew their eyes open and scream “PAY ATTENTION! THIS is how you frame a shoot out, THIS is how you film a car chase! Notice how the audience can FOLLOW and ENJOY the action you blithering incompetent IDIOTS!”
And the craziest thing of all…this movie, which treats guns as the coolest things on earth…is PRO GUN CONTROL! I mean, that’s either insanity or genius irony. I choose to believe the latter.
I can’t really criticise this movie. The stuff it does, it does brilliantly, and the stuff it doesn’t do would be pointless to moan about. It’s a movie called Shoot em Up, for Frack’s sake! You don’t go into a movie called Shoot Em Up and complain about the plotting or character development.
Yes it’s crude. Yes it’s violent. Yes it sheds about as much light on the human condition as a big, smelly dog poo. But it’s also a billion times more fun than the glum-faced and pretentious Bourne Ultimatum could ever hope to be.
"Meh...(Nibbles Carrot) What's up Doc?"
Long Version:
Here Be Spoilers! Enter At Thy Own Risk!
To start this review, I’d like to take a quick moment to interview the starts of Shoot Em Up, namely Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci. Hi guys, glad you could make it. Now, I know that the basic plot revolves around Clive protecting a newborn baby and Paul trying to kill it, but could you please describe the characters you play in the movie in as much detail as possible?
Clive Owen: Well, I’m the good guy.
Paul Giamatti: I’m the bad guy.
Monica Bellucci: And I’m the breasts.
Okay…uh, thanks for the…in depth discussion there. I don’t suppose you could furnish a little more depth to the role your characters play in the movie? Maybe give us their motivations or emotional tapestries?
Clive Owen: Well, I shoot bad people.
Paul Giamatti: I shoot good people.
Monica Bellucci: I have breasts.
Oookay….thanks, you can go now.
Now based on the above interview, you’ve probably already concluded that Shoot Em Up is about as awful as a Friday Night Popcorn flick can get and should be avoided like an unwelcome dose of the Ebola virus.
Man, you are so wrong. This movie is awesome in a way that few movies can ever be.
Why?
Well forget Space Jam, or Looney Tunes: Back in Action. THIS is the definitive Looney Tines live action movie. Seriously. It’s Bugs Vs Elmer Fudd. And it knows it.
Clive Owen takes the role of Bugs Bunny, right down to the habitual carrot chomping and the ability to defy the laws of physics whilst outwitting pursuers. He lives in a warehouse with a rodent-operated lock (yes, you read that right) and uses bullets to solve problems. Not just in a shooting people kind of way, although he does manage quite a lot of that. No, this is a guy who uses bullets for EVERYTHING, from cutting the umbilical cord of the baby he saves in the first scene to pushing a playground roundabout for said baby. He probably cooks food with bullets and completes his tax returns with bullets. And when he runs out of bullets, he uses the carrot. This movie has more carrot related fatalities than most movies have total body counts.
Paul Giamatti is in the Elmer Fudd role, the frustrated, portly pursuer of Clive’s Bugs, even at one point uttering the line “You Wascally Wabbit” after one of Owen’s ingenious gun-blazing escapes. He’s also utterly, utterly mental and evil in a way that’s almost a metaphysical experience. He’s like the god of unbalanced, scummy hit men. Witness the scene in the back of the car with him and a corpse that is both awfully vile and totally hilarious due to Giamatti’s facial acting. I dare you to watch it and not laugh.
And Monica Bellucci? Well, to put it bluntly, the only reason she’s in this movie is because Clive Owen needs boobs (for the baby, see?) Yes, this chick is basically there to be a pair of breasts, which shows a degree of refreshing honesty from the film as why this kind of movie has a woman in it. I’m pretty certain that if the filmmakers could have somehow separated Bellucci from the rest of her body and just had a huge pair of disembodied breasts bouncing along behind Clive Owen, they’d have done that.
What about the movie itself? Well, this will sound utterly bizarre, but it’s actually a very witty film, despite having hardly any plot or dialogue. Witness the scene where Owen and Giamatti throw insults at each other via the use of bullets and a neon sign. Or the bit where he creates a distraction in a museum by walking up to a mother who’s just finished spanking her kid and promptly spanks her, much to the kid’s delight. Or the bit where Owen rigs up a surprise for the baddies using some string, a CCTV camera and some other stuff he found lying around in the gun factory...
Ah, and the action. The sweet, sweet action. I cannot emphasise enough how nice it is to have an action film where you can actually see what the frack is going on, where the action isn’t ruined by stupid camera shake and terrible close-ups. It makes me want to grab certain directors, strap them to a chair in-front of the screen, sew their eyes open and scream “PAY ATTENTION! THIS is how you frame a shoot out, THIS is how you film a car chase! Notice how the audience can FOLLOW and ENJOY the action you blithering incompetent IDIOTS!”
And the craziest thing of all…this movie, which treats guns as the coolest things on earth…is PRO GUN CONTROL! I mean, that’s either insanity or genius irony. I choose to believe the latter.
I can’t really criticise this movie. The stuff it does, it does brilliantly, and the stuff it doesn’t do would be pointless to moan about. It’s a movie called Shoot em Up, for Frack’s sake! You don’t go into a movie called Shoot Em Up and complain about the plotting or character development.
Yes it’s crude. Yes it’s violent. Yes it sheds about as much light on the human condition as a big, smelly dog poo. But it’s also a billion times more fun than the glum-faced and pretentious Bourne Ultimatum could ever hope to be.
"Meh...(Nibbles Carrot) What's up Doc?"
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