- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday January 21 2008 18:24 GMT
Shoot 'em Up begins with Clive Owen assisting a woman's pregnancy while shooting several of her would-be assassins. When the baby comes out, not having any scissors to hand, he shoots the umbilical cord. Since one bullet has killed the mother, he then escapes with the infant over the rooftops, pausing for a gun battle with the remaining villains, carefully shooting out the lights of the neon ad behind them, for Faulk Truck Tools, until it reads F U K U. After that, the film gets quite energetic.
The baby/shotgun combo comes straight from John Woo's Hard Boiled, but Woo hasn't been this much fun since Face/Off. For mindless, kinetic action lunacy, it is in the league of Jason Statham's Crank. And for film noir lighting - no daylight allowed - you'd think of the Sin City films, also with Owen, who does his coolly pissed-off stare, while reminding the Broccolis and the rest of us that he can do mass murder with quips as well as some secret agents we could mention. There's no clumpy Sin City-style sentimentality here, though.
You expect a phallic element in this genre, but here, uniquely, it is represented by the humble carrots Owen chews on, a hint that this is every bit as cartoony as Bugs Bunny, without actually being a cartoon. Paul Giamatti is the fiendish villain who gets to call him a "wascally wabbit" and whose guns are skilfully adapted to work only with the owner's thumbprint. This proves no problem for Owen: you cut one of the dead ones' hands off and use that to aim his gun. Monica Bellucci plays a lactating hooker he abducts (is there a special "lactating" section to the modern brothel? Anyway, she comes in handy when you're lugging a newborn about). The plot remains consistently outrageous - a senator's clandestine baby hatchery above a heavy metal club? What was director writer Michael Davis on? Jane Austen fans should perhaps look elsewhere, but this is a crisp (86 minutes) spoof that doesn't outstay its welcome. My compliments to Birmingham-born Davis, whose previous oeuvre I seem to have missed, and the 39 stuntpeople credited, if they all survived it.
