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.

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