Shoot ‘Em Up is a shitty movie. I mean that literally: At least two scenes involve the feces of an infant being smeared across someone or something in all its brownish-green, Vertigo Comics color palette glory. The ostensible reason for this is because the movie involves a gunsel and a prostitute attempting to save a baby from assassins, and hence the baby shit. But the real reason is for the filmmakers to show us that that’s how far out they’ll go! That’s if you didn’t catch the part where they jammed a carrot through a guy’s throat, or through a guy’s eye. Or where a john looks up from Monica Bellucci’s awe-inspiring breasts with her milk dribbling down his chin. Or where another john moans and groans up against a dumpster as Bellucci sucks his cock off frame. Or where a woman who’s just given birth is shot in the head and left in a stairway by the hero with one breast exposed, with said exposed breast of a dead woman getting a close-up as our hero leaves, and another as the bad guy takes a look at her, and a third and final one a while later as the bad guy checks it out, lasciviously fondles it, then sniffs his hand after the fact.
In other words, Shoot ‘Em Up is an icky movie in which the shit-smearing is all too appropriate, because yes it’s far out, but it’s also unpleasant and who wants to see that? The fact that it’s knowingly far out–it is called Shoot ‘Em Up, after all–only makes things worse. Why should Paul Giamatti engage in necrophiliac groping in a movie whose ostensible goal is to be Kung Fu Hustle with shooting instead of kicking?
Maybe that tonal inconsistency will hook fans of stuff like The Host, but for me the laughs (well, “laughs,” because nothing in this is terribly funny except for one bit about drivers who don’t signal while changing lanes, a bit that’s immediately undone by a bout of wanton property destruction that is a lot more inconsiderate than our hero’s pet peeve about signaling), anyway for me the “laughs” don’t leaven the icky stuff at all–they make me feel like I’m being either pandered to or condescended to or both by that icky stuff by filmmakers who know better. I got the same vibe from the gun-control message that pops up rather incongruously in the fourth act. I totally get the point–there’s nothing about enjoying gun violence in the movies that makes gun violence okay in real life–but first of all that’s a truism, and second of all, again, there might as well be a subtitle reading “we’re slumming” running across the bottom of the screen every time Clive Owen shoots someone in the torso.
Thanks to the periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas that my friends and I get together for every few months–in which we gather at someone’s house, eat junk food, get drunk, and enjoy a triple bill of extremely macho movies–I’ve seen quite a few action films of ’80s vintage in the recent past. At last I understand why Reagan-era culture warriors thought movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. This is because movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. Rambo, Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Tango & Cash, Road House–it’s almost difficult to describe how gratuitously violent these films are, how much these films are unimaginable without violence, how much the violence is woven unthinkingly into what makes them work so goddamn well, unless you’ve seen them. They make Shoot ‘Em Up look like a Noel Coward comedy of manners. How? Allow me to demonstrate with this scene involving Mikhail, the bad guy from the 1985 Chuck Norris vs. invading Communists actioner Invasion U.S.A.. (Originally found at the wonderful So Bad It’s Good.)
Don’t bother trying to out-batshit-crazy a movie that contains a scene like that. You can’t! It isn’t knowing, it isn’t camp, it isn’t funny, it isn’t pretty, it isn’t prettified with in-jokes, irony, or Looney Tunes references. It’s approximately 90 minutes of people being shot to death with machine guns–cops, bystanders, women in shopping malls, office workers, Cubans, fucking everybody. It’s insane, a gleeful kind of crazy you can only get from the movies. I love it. I’m sure it was made as a cheap cash-in that no one thought twice about, but that too is part of its magic. It is what it is, like Yahweh. You go po-faced or you don’t go at all. The second you add wink-wink nudge-nudge you confront the audience with idea that on some level you know better. And to hell with that.
I don’t know, part of my principled defense of those indefensible action flicks may just be blog bullshitting. I think those ’80s action movies are extraordinary films for how guilelessly manipulative they are, is mainly what I’m saying–today, in the post-Bay/Bruckheimer world, the popcorn explosion flicks are so much slicker about it, or they put it in quotes like Shoot ‘Em Up does. And maybe I’m inventing a principled objection to Shoot ‘Em Up where none exists. I think that ultimately my real beefs with the movie are simple. The jokes aren’t funny (late-period Pierce Brosnan Bond wordplay, mostly). Worse, the action isn’t really innovative or well-choreographed or even particularly bloody. For every memorably sanguine offing, there’s like forty miscellaneous goons getting popped in their black leather jackets in medium shot. It’s like the squib shipment got sent to the wrong set, and maybe if I go see that movie where the Rock has to take care of a little girl, all of a sudden her ballet class will erupt in a Wild Bunch orgy of bloodletting. There’s certainly nothing that’ll push boundaries or stick in your head like Sin City or 300 or Kill Bill, to use three idiosyncratic American action films to which this one will inevitably be compared. (I’d compare it to the John Woo Hong Kong action flicks that have been cited as inspiration, but I don’t think much of those either, to be honest. End already, Hard Boiled!) If there were, that’d go a long way to replicating the gonzo thrill you get from watching Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren punch each other in the face for ten minutes at the end of Rocky IV, but you don’t get anything like that. You don’t even see Monica Bellucci’s tits or Clive Owen’s ass. Instead, you get Paul Giamatti groping the exposed nipple of a mother who was shot in the head minutes after getting birth, and a baby’s shit smeared on a henchman’s face. The Bugs Bunny riffs can’t help you.
You didn’t like Hard Boiled? Are you sure you’ve got a pulse?
Sean – I haven’t seen Shoot ’em Up, so this might be a complete tangent, but what do you think of the Shane Black school of action movies? Stuff like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – movies where there’s (a) calculated but jarring tonal shifts (b) a certaining knowingness about how goofy the whole thing is.
I like these movies quite a bit, but they definitely don’t have the same kind of “purity” as First Blood or Red Dawn. But what I’m maybe trying to get at is: is it a question of there being some rule that Shoot ’em Up breaks or, rather, is it a question of knowing how to break the rule if you’re going to do it. (I don’t know if that makes sense – let me know).
I’m not Sean (and aren’t various loved ones of ours glad), but I tend to figure that everything can be done, artistically, but some things have to be done just so. And I throw in the expansion joint phrase “can be done so as to work for this particular audience”. I find myself writing less these days about what a work is or does and more about what I do in response to it.
When it comes to “guilessly manipulative”, a phrase I admire very much, I think…I haven’t formalized my thinking about this, but just as the narrator explains to Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress about “funny” versus “funny once”, I think that there are “one era” kinds of successes – things that work in the moment they’re made, but not after. When I do this up right, I’ll talk about the responsibility of creators to pay attention to what other people are doing, whether it’s to draw from them or to sharpen their own sense of purpose and be not doing what the others are doing. I’ll have a wave at Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and its comments about the same words mean different things in different eras.
Basically, trying to pretend that Clinton and Bush II and Woo and Stone and Tarantino and Ellis and everyone never existed or if they did simply don’t matter, and therefore we can recycle stuff from 20-30 years ago without adjustment, seems…well, dumb. Not a good foundation for doing anything interesting. The question “What of this still works now, and what should good modern equivalents be?” would be a lot more interesting and more likely, I think, to lead to work that I find as cool and weird and fun as that, but not the same.
Now to go get more caffeine. 🙂
The part where he smashed head-on into the van and flew through both windshields and landed in the back of the van and shot all those guys, that was awesome! Er, um, I mean, the mis en scene was trite and cliched, other phrases, harrumph harrumph.
Jon–I haven’t seen any of the movies you mention, but that’s largely by choice. I don’t like action comedies. To me, the combination produces thrill-less action and unfunny comedy. And if I were the type who got worked up about movies desensitizing people to violence, those would be my prime targets, but I’m not really that type. I do love The Monster Squad, though, which was a Shane Black script.
Bruce–I think you’re right about trying to recapture the action-movie past. My friends and I were trying to think of any recent movies that work the same way the good-bad movies we watch at our manly movie nights work, and it really is impossible to do that anymore. I think 300 and Reign of Fire come close, but they’re both also doing other things. I should note that I don’t think Shoot ‘Em Up was trying to be Rambo at all, but it did make me think of how movies like Rambo are a million times crazier and more viscerally exciting than Shoot ‘Em Up without TRYING to be crazy like Shoot ‘Em Up did.
Jim–Was that even really that awesome? It would have been awesomer if he’d smashed his head into the back of their van and they all turned around and shot him while he lied there stunned.
Yes, it was really that awesome.
Bruce – That makes a lot of sense (esp. the “funny” vs. “funny once” stuff). Thanks!
Sean – A tangent: I’m not sure if I already made this comment on one of you other blog posts, but I just saw The Monster Squad again and I think it holds up really well. I especially liked the raunchiness/swearing/etc. Ahhh, they don’t make ’em like that anymore, either!
I think we’re in sort of a transitional era for action movies. People are still poking around with the hyperkinetic pulsed-action, the heavy digital manipulation of color palettes, and all, and seeing what you can do with them and how cheaply. There’s a set of tools looking for the equivalent of John Carpenter, who can look at them and think about solid stories using them – he or she is presumably out there right now posting funny and imaginative clips to YouTube and saving up for longer works.
Carnival of souls
* This interview of Benjamin Marra by GQ’s Alex Pappademas is really fabulous for a variety of reasons, even beyond the fact that it’s an interview with Benjamin Marra in GfuckinQ. First of all, it’s the longest interview with Marra…