Film Clips	Shoot 'Em Up by M. Faust

If you ask me, the thing Hollywood does really well—the thing it needs to do well—isn’t making movies. It’s making trailers. It’s the trailer, after all, that gets people to see a movie. A movie only has to be good enough to provide three or four minutes that can be edited into a segment that will intrigue people enough to plop down their $9 for a ticket. After that, it doesn’t much matter if the movie stinks: it’s not like theaters give refunds.

Shoot ’em Up has a terrific trailer, filled with Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti shooting guns at each other, making bad jokes and generally looking like they’re having the time of their lives. But here’s the surprising thing: Those aren’t just three carefully edited minutes. The whole freakin’ movie is like that! There are maybe 76 or 77 seconds of calm at the very beginning, after which it’s nonstop mayhem for the next 80 minutes. You think 80 minutes is short? Believe me, you won’t walk away complaining you didn’t get your $9 worth.

The plot is too preposterous to bother with, placing Owen in charge of a newborn baby who is the target of a squad of assassins led by Giamatti. Needing to feed said infant, he of course heads to the nearest lactating hooker he knows, played by Monica Bellucci, whom you will no longer recall as the Virgin Mary in The Passion of the Christ. Together they uncover an evil plot to (here’s the best joke in the film) prevent a senator from passing gun reform laws!

If you were to take this at all seriously, you might note how ridiculous it is that Owen and Giamatti never have any problem tracking each other down, or that Owen (who is vaguely identified as an ex Special Forces operative) susses out the evil plot with a minimum of clues. There’s a reason for that: Do you really want to be spending time watching them stalking around looking for clues when you could have another protracted gunfight sequence? Of course not!

It resembles the best moments from some of the more over-the-top John Woo films, a standard even Woo hasn’t been able to meet since he emigrated to Hollywood. (It helps that the cinematographer was Peter Pau, who shot Woo’s classic The Killer as well as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.) The writer-director is one Michael Davis, who is not a newcomer, though his previous work seems to have been made for young teens. Shoot ’em Up is inane, delirious, and outrageous—and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more.