Is that a carrot in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?

Note: I don’t usually write about things that I hate, because there’s really nothing productive that can come out of talking shit on the Internet. But for Shoot ‘Em Up, I will make a special exception, on the grounds that if I even convince one person not to see this movie, I might be able to stop some injustice in the world from going down.

When I went to the cast and crew screening of Shoot ‘Em Up last night, all I knew about the film was the scant information one can garner from the posters that are currently adorning our city: I knew I would be seeing two fairly well respected dramatic actors (Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti), holding guns, grimacing, and leaping through a nondescript urban backdrop, while Monica Bellucci (that Italian chick who Gaspar Noé cinematically raped in Irreversible) stands in the background showing off her sexy hourglass figure. With a name like “Shoot ‘Em Up,” the other thing you learn from glancing at the poster is that, whether intentionally or not, you’re in for a silly, if not down-right absurd action film.

What you may not garner from a glance at at the poster, or even by watching the relatively tame trailer, is that Shoot ‘Em Up is a completely fucked up, misogynistic, self-indulgent, hateful, and downright retarded piece of shit. Let me explain. There’s nothing innately wrong with gratuitous violence. For example: Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike are just a handful of modern filmmakers who employ over-the-top cinematic violence in clever, intelligent, and emotionally resonant ways. It can even be fun to watch violence-filled popcorn movies that have no real artistic credibility, which is exactly how I approached Shoot ‘Em Up as I entered the theater— prepared to share some thrills and a few laughs with my friends. Then, the lights dimmed.

The film starts with a bored, tough-looking Clive Owen sitting at a bus stop in the middle of the night. He’s chewing on a carrot— this is one of writer/director Michael Davis’ (whose previous credits are mainly direct-to-video boob flicks like Girl Fever and 100 Girls) heavy-handed allusions to “Looney Tunes,” the cartoon he uses as a scapegoat to justify the film’s callousness. Owen doesn’t flinch as a terrified pregnant woman runs past him, moments away from giving birth. But when a man with a gun shows up a moment later, ready to kill the bitch, Owen begrudgingly becomes involved in what turns out to be a massive conspiracy to murder the foetus inside of this unnamed pregnant woman’s uterus.

After delivering the baby— in the middle of a massive shoot-out with the bad guys— he uses his gun to blast away the umbilical cord, and tries to make a break for it with the woman and her child. A minute later, she’s shot in the head and he leaves her useless corpse behind in a stairwell. Oh well! She provided a child— what more can you expect out of a woman? At least she can skip the post-partum depression. But Owen’s character is all about the sanctity of families, so he grabs the newborn and makes a run for it, cradling the baby under his arm throughout the rest of the picture as he slays dozens of bad guy cronies, who are always on his tail thanks to the ceaseless efforts of Paul Giamatti, our ever-seething villain.

Clive Owen is pro-life at all costs.

Next, we’re introduced to Monica Bellucci, who’s a hooker with a specialty in breast feeding. We see that her clientele is primarily made up of creepy old men in adult diapers, and it is at this point that we get our first inkling of the kind of beast that we are dealing with. Michael Davis— the auteur who is taking us on this wild ride— is an adult baby. Or, at least suffering from severe case of arrested development. Because Shoot ‘Em Up is written from the point of view of an angry, weak 12-year-old boy. Bellucci is recruited to function both as mother to the inner child of Davis (personified by the helpless newborn), and whore to Clive Owen— the invincible, übermensch fantasy version of our director.

Hot mama! Show us your boobs.

For example, Bellucci entices Owen to fuck her by offering him a finger covered in baby food. While giving the much-experienced whore the best lay of her life, some baddies crash through the windows, and Owen blows them all away with his gun, without missing a beat, fucking Bellucci against the wall and obliterating the last bad guy just as he comes. “Talk about blowing your load,” quips Owen as Bellucci collapses in rapture. But if we are to take his dialogue at face value, Davis claims to despise the gun/penis analogy, as a character states in another scene: “All that stuff about guns being phalluses is bullshit.”

Writer/Director Michael Davis, acting like a kid in a candy store.

“I thought this was a good way of taking pieces of my personality and putting it into a genre piece,” says Michael Davis in an interview with IGN. What Davis is referring to is how Clive Owen, throughout the film, is prone to turning homicidal at the drop of a hat over the littlest annoyances. People who don’t use their turn signals while driving deserve to die, people with pony tails get shot in the head, and hippies with dirty toes get shot in the feet. “I kind of became this angry guy who wrote so many scripts and tried to make all these movies and never felt like I could break through,” says Davis in his interview. “I became this guy who every little thing I would hate. I mean, I hate guys with ponytails or guys who drive badly on the road!” There is nothing more self-evident in the film. The only way it could have been more explicit is if Paul Giamatti had turned to the camera and announced, “Alright kids, now we’re entering a violent fantasy that the filmmaker has been harboring since childhood.”

The only thing I can compare it to is Richard McBeef, the short script written by infamous sociopath Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer. But at least Cho didn’t try to instill his violent wet dreams with muddled political undertones. In an effort to move the plot forward, Shoot ‘Em Up takes an anti-gun control turn, as it’s revealed that the entire vicious manhunt is a result of cowardly actions taken by the Democratic front-runner for president, who’s basing his whole campaign on the (in the movie’s Universe) wildly popular and widely supported liberal issue of gun control laws. Needless to say, this more than annoys Clive Owen, and within minutes of the politician’s scheme is revealed, Owen callously assassinates the movie’s stand-in for Clinton/Obama.

Mine’s bigger than yours!

Finally, we have Paul Giamatti’s character, the villainous hit-man. As the only man with the cojones to take Owen on, Giamatti is always on the verge of symbolically castrating our main man. After any number of stalemate stand-offs between Giamatti and Owen, the climax leads us to a resolution of the film’s main conflict: namely, the ever-present questioning of Owen’s masculinity— if not by Giamatti, then by the leagues of faceless men who try to kill him throughout. Just when it seems Giamatti is about to receive the validation he’s been seeking, waving his massive penis, I mean gun in Clive Owen’s face, Owen (naturally) turns the tables and comes out on top, delivering his death knell with one last quip, taking Giamatti to task for his weak charade: “You know what I hate more than anything? A pussy with a gun in his hand.” Well, you know what I hate more than anything? A pussy with a screenplay in his hand.