Shoot 'Em Up

Non-stop action! No plot!! Starring Clive Owen!!! With Monica Belluccii!!!! Who is she? Only one of the finest Italian actresses in the business. She's a fine actress, even finer than Asia Argento.

You can imagine the possibilities. Owen and Bellucci are having sex. Men with guns burst into the room. They continue having sex while Owen kills them. At the end, he says, "Talk about shootin' your load." Classic. Or consider, after shooting many people in a room to death, he turns to a man still left alive and says, "So what do you think of the Second Amendment now?" It has the best smart-aleck answer to "How'd you know that?": "You didn't hear of my Nobel Prize?" Owen also kills several people with a carrot, which he is always eating.

This film is a lot like "Crank," another clever non-stop action movie, and both of them, despite the action, bored me at times. But, I must say, some of the action sequences in "Shoot 'Em Up" are so preposterous (in a good way) that they have to be seen to be believed.

The film is also hampered by the third wheel, Paul Giamatti. He can't act. He's a male Judi Dench: an overrated one-note actor. Whenever anyone needs a snooty sprig, an uptight person in power, i.e. Queen, rich heiress, domineering boss, they call Dame Dench. When directors want a worthless schlub, Giamatti's their man. The difference is that Dench is sometimes worth watching (the Bond films), while Giamatti never is ("Sideways," "Cinderella Man," etc.). The distressing thing about him, though, is that now he's branching out and getting action roles. When will people learn?