This film revolves around a single stranger called Mr. Smith. One day, this man delivers a child during an exchange of fire with him facing a different fate when he is assigned to protect the child from criminals to kill him but faces a very difficult course.
...an affectionate, often very funny Simpsons parody of its whole eponymous genre. It's a live-action McBane as co-directed by Quentin Tarantino and Chuck Jones.... Shoot 'Em Up is Hot Fuzz gone to the Dark Side.
Clive Owen is ideally cast as the likeable loner (with a tragedy in his past, of course) whose self defence and killing efficiency is declared with deadpan delivery.
Far from being a spoof on the genre, Shoot 'Em Up is an action movie with the flab removed - with no more than maybe ten minutes of exposition, you're left with a series of interconnecting money shots, each one more gooey than the last.
One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics -- I was -- but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.
This is seedy, morally defunct, low-IQ cinema for airheads: it's toe-curlingly violent and mostly plain nasty, but quite fun in a debauched kind of way.
The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, Sin City, which in comparison was a chamber drama.
The Scorecard Review
March 03, 2008
...painfully uncool one-liners, a flat performance from Clive Owen, a disgusting job by Paul Giamatti and a plot that reveals itself to be idiotic.
Merrily amoral, shamelessly watchable and outlandishly funny, Shoot 'Em Up is not for all tastes, but those with a dark sense of humor will have a ball.
