Shoot 'em Up may well be the worst movie released all year. It's easily the stupidest, and bear in mind I've recently watched Evan Almighty, License to Wed and American Dreamz. Dreams... with a Z.I'd warn you of SPOILERS AHEAD, but I'd be doing you a disservice in that you might not know what an abject failure this movie is. The "plot," such as it is, concerns a baby-breeding ring organized by an evil Presidential candidate who needs their bone marrow and colludes with a handgun maker to kill all the babies and their mothers to cover up the conspiracy. I think. The "hero," such as he is, is the son of a legion of British pistol experts who fled to America when the gun laws tightened, who was taken in by Black Ops when he was ten only to reemerge into society in time to inherit his father's gun shop where he unwittingly sold the shotguns to criminals who would later hold up a McDonald's, killing his wife and son with the guns he sold, driving him to live on the streets as a nameless hobo nihilist, surviving solely on carrots until this blissful existence is interrupted by a meeting with one of the baby-breeding mothers who is killed, leaving the last baby in his care – a baby he proceeds to take on an hour and fifteen minutes of the worst "gun as phallus" adventures imaginable.
The fetishistic gun/penis connection is nothing new, but the depths to which this movie plumbs the cliche certainly are. A few of the most egregious examples include the "hero" severing an umbilical cord with his gun, getting in a gunfight while he's delivering the baby, getting in a gunfight while he's making a baby, cleaning his gun on a baby-changing station in a decrepit bathroom and bonding with the baby by showing him how to use a loaded gun. Not to be outdone, the villain of the film uses his gun to both masturbate with a nude woman's corpse and attempt to burn off a hooker with a heart of gold's labia.
The movie attempts to be sort of a giddy ultraviolent take on MacGuyver, but in its quest for kewl it serves as perhaps the most idiotic and insensitive example of an already callous genre. Avoid at all costs.
6 comments:
Wow. That's something.
Done and done.
License To Wed? Really? Why do you torture yourself?
That's how I cut all my kids umbilical cord.
I bet you don't own a gun. If you did, you wouldn't be bad-mouthing all of the cool things you could do with it.
Why does Clive Owen feel like he needs to save the babies (Children of Men)?
Your review of this movie (which I had not even heard of) will definitely help me steer clear of it.
Dave: Yes, yes it is.
Chris: It was between rounds of bingo.
Phil: I hear that's how all the cool kids do it.
Frank: Eh, it's like whether you celebrate or not after scoring a touchdown. Act like you've been there before.
Valerie: Hadn't picked up on the baby-saving fixation – good catch. And he covered both ends of the spectrum, as Children of Men was one of the best movies of the year, while this was by far one of the worst.
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