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Shooting stars

Clive Owen takes a dive in this bloody cartoon
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 21st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Try Hard 2. Clive Owen in a cartoon that could have been more than it is.
Shoot 'Em Up

Directed by Michael Davis
With Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci

In Christian Volckman’s intriguing film Renaissance, we saw animation (through motion capture) edge closer to realism. With Michael Davis’ Shoot ’Em Up, we get the opposite: live action perfectly framed as cartoon. Davis has expertly storyboarded his film to the point where each shot looks like a comic-strip panel, missing only the speech bubbles and the “pows” and “boffs” of the original Batman or that wonderfully odd little Czech film from the ’60s, Kdo chce zabít Jessii?
Davis achieves this with unexpected (and rarely explained) jumps in the action and narrative, tightly held close-ups and medium shots, and dialogue that is strictly Manga-nese. In fact, Shoot ’Em Up is probably the closest an American film has come to fully absorbing lessons from Asian popular culture, especially Chinese martial art films, Japanese hentai and a raft of other Otaku influences (though as a “real” graphic novel, Richard Rodriguez’s Sin City is far superior).
Yet, cumbered with such blatant originality, the whole seems forced; Shoot ’Em Up is far too conscious and proud of itself. What could have been an entertaining, gunographic cartoon becomes an hour and a half of audiences being treated like some dull-normal popcorn feeders who are too thick to get the joke.
The protagonist of Davis’ film (from his own script) is Smith (Clive Owen), a carrot-munching rogue hero who suddenly finds himself in the center of violence when he comes to the aid of a pregnant woman. Smith not only manages to gun down the clot of thugs chasing the woman, he also midwifes her child into the world, deftly severing the umbilical cord with a clean shot from his magnum.
Scurrying about an abandoned warehouse with a blood-drained woman in one arm and a birth-caked baby in the other, someone is bound to catch a stray bullet, and in little time dear old mom is deposited on a stairwell with a wound between the eyes.
After a series of death-defying leaps and further shoot-ups, Smith is in need of some child care. He decides to take the orphaned baby boy to an old girlfriend, Donna Quintano (Monica Bellucci), who is a lactating strumpet at a specialty brothel. As her first name advertises, she’s a Maria Lactans, the milking Madonna.
There’s a history between this pair, and Donna will turn down Smith’s offer to play wet nurse for the kid. But, after showing Smith and his bundle to the door, she’s visited by Hertz (Paul Giamatti), the blood-drunk honcho behind the mob that was trying to kill the pregnant woman. Now he’s on Smith’s trail.
What follows is as determinably nonsensical as it is triumphantly superficial. There’s a glut of human flesh to gorge on, often served with carrots by our hero (who knew root crops could be so lethal?).
There’s also the actors’ defiant delivery of Davis’ expired witticisms. After shtupping the now-pliant Donna against a wall while killing a room full of hitmen, Smith naturally quips, “Talk about shooting your load.” There’s also a chance for the carrot-wielding Smith to ask Hertz, “What’s up, Doc?” “You wascally wabbit,” Hertz spits out in reply. This is really all you need to know about the script.
As this week has become an unofficial Clive Owen film festival, it allows his fans a chance to fear for their favorite’s career. After a string of excellent performances, particularly in Spike Lee’s Inside Man and Alfonso Cuaron’s superb Children of Men, Owen seems to have found himself on some beefcake slave block off of Santa Monica Boulevard.
Owen has inhabited the world of live-action comics before, in Rodriguez’s Sin City (in fact, the actor will appear in that director’s follow-up, Sin City 2). But here he can’t help but show how much better he is than the material.
Giamatti gets a chance to sneer and leer like the Joker without the white slap and lipstick, while Bellucci is perfectly fine as the dame. But, as with Owen, the rest of the cast seem as exhausted and bored at the end of this flick as the audience.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (21/11/2007):

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