Gunplay and Bad Politics

 

Shoot’em Up
2007 

D: Mike Davis 

**********

Pros: Amazing action scenes, Some good songs

Cons: Hamfisted anti-gun message, Sexism, Crude humor, Unlikeable protagonist, Lazy scoring

     There are many movies which I hated.  Many movies have made me wonder what possessed me to go see them.  This movie, on the other hand, made me feel cheated.  I cannot think of a movie that lied so blatantly about what it was about as Shoot’em Up did.    After having been led to believe that this was simply a fun action-comedy, I ended up sitting through what turned out to be a rabid anti-gun diatribe.  I know that you can’t give away a movie’s plot, but if you’re going to tackle a serious political issue, you’re obligated to let people know before they pay money to see that movie.

     The movie begins innocently enough.  Smith (Clive Owen) comes to the rescue of a pregnant woman who is being pursued by a gang led by Hertz (Paul Giamatti, who is far too good an actor to be in this movie).  In the ensuing gunfight, the woman gives birth while Smith fends off the baddies, the casings from his gun bouncing off her pregnant belly in a disturbingly fetishistic way. 

Screenshot of Clive Owen performing an impromptu childbirth in a much better movie

     After childbirth, the woman is subsequently killed by the villains (gee, it’s almost as if she died after fulfilling her purpose in life), forcing Smith to locate a lactating hooker in order to feed the infant.  Hey kids, let’s try and figure out who plays this character!  Let’s see, hmmm…the character is undeveloped…she’s mostly there for fanservice…she’s in a really bad movie…hmm…could it be?  YES, YOU’RE RIGHT!  SHE IS PLAYED BY MONICA BELUCCI! 

You win a car!

     Unfortunately, Hertz comes to the conclusion that the baby needs milk through bafflingly disgusting means (he realizes it when helping himself to the dead mother’s breast milk), and miraculously tracks down the very same hooker.  Bullet-riddled hijinks and abysmally sophomoric humor ensue.  The whole movie is set to an annoying and lazy rock “score,” but a few enjoyable songs appear (Motley Crue’s "Kickstart My Heart" is good, and Paul Oakenfold’s "Switch On" makes for a great car chase song).  The pursuit continues until halfway through the movie, when we find out that the whole plot is based on a conspiracy by an evil gun manufacturer to murder a batch of babies (of which this one is the sole survivor) bred specifically to provide bone marrow to a dying anti-gun politician (I must say it is rather ironic that it is the conservative strawman from whom infants need to be defended).  This is political demonization at its worst.  You might say that I should ignore this and enjoy the film, but the film wouldn’t let me.  Once the anti-gun Aesop is made apparent, it is continuously rubbed in the face of the audience and cannot be escaped.  It’s hard to just turn my brain off and have fun when a message is constantly being crammed down my throat.  The movie attempts to discredit gun owners’ cause by claiming that the reason guns appeal to people is so that “pussies” can pretend they’re tough, a perversion of a legitimate pro-gun argument.  Guns do provide weak people with strength, but that is not a bad thing; they enable many who would be at the disadvantage of in a fight to defend themselves from those who would take advantage of them.  Attempting to shame gun owners by appealing to their sense of manliness completely misses the point of why they believe in the 2nd Amendment.  It has nothing to do with being "macho."  In fact, machoness for its own sake is a terrible ideology to base a society on (just look at Sparta).   Having guns may not make you seem more genuinely masculine, but that's not the point.  Our country was built on reason, freedom and equality, and the 2nd Amendment is one of the many things meant to even the playing field so that we don't live in a world where might makes right.  Apparently, liberals do support Social Darwinism.

      I must also talk about the hypocrisy concerning this message.  It makes no sense to have actors playing with automatic weapons on set and filming violent action scenes, then turning around and lecturing us about how bad guns are.  Not only is there a lot of gunplay in this movie, the way the firearms are filmed can legitimately be called gunporn.  Of course, the filmmakers inevitably make the claim that they are merely satirizing the fetishistic portrayal of firearms, and this is a pet peeve of mine.  And, no, don't tell me I "don't understand satire."  That's just a cop-out for lazy writers who cannot handle the art form intelligently.  There is good satire and bad satire.  When you set out to satirize or discredit a trope, you make jokes about it; you show why it’s ridiculous.   You do not simply revel in the trope and then turn around and say that you were making fun of it.  Satire doesn’t work that way.  Oddly enough, it can be argued that in the far superior Children of Men there is a subtle anti-gun message: Clive Owen’s character does not use a gun once, and this is a much less hypocritical approach that actually enhances the movie’s tension. 

      Suffice to say, the “good guys” end up beating the eeeevil gun company and saving the day.  I use the term “good guys” loosely here; they’re certainly not very sympathetic.  Smith is about as annoying as a 90’s antihero can get.  His only character traits are bitter cynicism and wangst.  He spends most of the movie vanquishing antagonists while reciting the increasingly bitchy and annoying mantra: “Do you know what I f---ing hate?”  The movie attempts to give him some development with a brief revelation about his past that is merely tacked on.  In fact, I actually found Paul Giamatti’s villain more sympathetic.  His frustration at Smith's opposition gives him the lovability of a cartoon antagonist, and his phone conversations with his wife reveal that he loves his family (albeit in a twisted way).  That’s more than what the protagonists have going for them.  When a character’s primary motivation throughout a movie is infanticide and he’s the most likable character, that movie has problems.  As for Monica Belluci…well, she’s a lactating hooker.  That’s all you really need to know about her.

     About as offensive as the anti-gun message is the movie’s treatment of women.  As I mentioned before, owning a gun can prevent those at a physical disadvantage in a violent situation from becoming victims, and that includes women.  So I guess it’s only natural that one of the most anti-gun movies I've seen is also one of the most misogynistic.  Just like in some tasteless midnight movie, women are gleefully killed in order to entertain people who have a very twisted definition of escapist entertainment.  In the most enraging scene in the movie, Smith grabs a mother and publicly spanks her for “beating” (actually, spanking) her naughty child, who applauds the scene as much as the audience is expected to.  I can only think of the disturbing sexual implications of spanking a grown woman and be disgusted by the mild rape scene happening before my eyes.  I have heard that the actress in question was actually looking forward to being sexually assaulted by Clive Owen…sigh…you go girl.  Now let’s review the roles that women play in this movie:

Mike Davis loves women.

     What partially surprised me is that despite the movie’s simplistic characterization, crude humor and stylized action, the critical community seemed to embrace it.  It’s kind of odd how such a normally stodgy demographic would enjoy such a movie.  Funny how Roger Ebert, who had previously played the role of butthurt moral guardian when he panned good edgy movies like Fight Club and Team America: World Police, still thought it proper to give this thing a positive review.  I thought critics were the guardians of cinema’s integrity as an art form, and there’s no way they would praise a completely shallow travesty of a film just because they agreed with it on gun control, now would they?

Why, the very idea!

     I despise this abortion of a movie.  I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns.  It makes my blood boil, but I can hardly find anyone who feels the same way about this movie I do.  Virtually every negative review of this movie I have read ignores the movie's true flaws and criticizes the action scenes because its writer apparently doesn't understand the concept of fun.  Make no mistake, the one good thing about this movie is the action.  It's visceral, wonderfully inventive and sublimely unrealistic, just the way I like it.  In fact, if you were to judge the movie by its gunfights alone, it’s one of the best action movies I have ever seen; up there with Hard Boiled and Equilibrium.  Although this is probably my least favorite movie of all time, I recommend watching it just for those scenes…although preferably in a language you don’t understand.  This actually makes the movie even more frustrating for me; why would they waste such good action on such a terrible movie?  I know that Mike Davis made this live-action cartoon in a childish sense of fun, but it would have been nice if he had left the political commentary to the grown-ups.          


ONLY GOOD QUOTE FROM MOVIE

SMITH: [spotting a henchman with a pony tail in the middle of the a gunfight] You know what I hate?
BABY FACTORY: No!
SMITH: I hate these forty-year-old jackholes wearing pony-tails.  That pony tail doesn't make you look hip, young, or cool.

The only man who ever made a pony tail look cool.