SHOOT' EM UP (2007) - ****1/2Weeks back for his WAR review, Rorschach used Woo's FACE/OFF as his reference point.
Well, I'll use it now for SHOOT' EM UP, but it doesn't just push the envelope that FACE/OFF did for the hyperbole action cinema. It shreds it this side of a boxfull Enron office memos and then sets them on fire. Then just because SHOOT' EM UP could, it wipes its ass with whats left of the burned papers.
Hell, it even makes FACE/OFF looks amateurish in comparison....and I earlier wrote a review where I dug it. Its like discovering an awesome old-school Walkman, then the next day you get an iPod. Writer/Director Michael Davis made a better John Woo movie than Woo has shot since leaving Hong Kong.
In fact, I'm gonna get burned by my fellow action junkies but I rate this movie equally with Woo's hyperbole classic HARD BOILED. Its that slick, its that lean, its junk action narrative is that fat-free of unnecessary shots/scenes, and you know what?
Its actually a cool as hell movie, not a wannabe
Hacks like Fuqua and Bay waste hundreds of millions in trying to shoot cool pictures and their pathetic slow-motion walk-aways. But Davis, and his really great cast, just do it so effortlessly and without you the audience having to "pretend" that they are cool, one could easily make the wrong impression that the whole endeavor was effortless.
There is no plot set-up for SHOOT'EM UP when it begins, no nonsense to give the audience some crap about what Clive Owen is, blah blah. No showing the bad guys in a cliche attempt at creating suspense. No, film cuts to Owen on a bus stop, eating his carrot, when pregnant woman runs by, followed by gun-wielding thug. Owen says "F***" and goes to work.
We then get an insane as hell gunbattle that an action-fan like me would expect in any other picture's finale where it sets up the film's MacGuffin, the baddie Paul Giamatti, and the dillemma.
Then with the Monica Belluchi scenes, its a trash romancer storyline, but you buy it. Its not dead scenes inbetween the gun fighting, but integral with the film. But with the ending, its as sterile, clean, and perfect in its conclusion as with the beginning as the gun that Owen wipes down repeatedly throughout the picture.
In the last year or so, we've gotten movies that play Michael Bay's sad game urinated-on-technicolor cinematography and ADD-ridden editing, but actually them both for a purpose.
I quite enjoyed SMOKIN' ACES in spite of the convulted story, and CRANK as a less-successful, if pumped with as much testosterone, cave-dwelling ancestor of Davis' picture. But SHOOT' EM UP is flawless in its insanity.
People will complain of crazy cartoonish action moments with this movie and yeah, I've complained of such retardness in Bay pictures before. But you know what the difference is?
While Bay makes his cartoons with a tone of being dead serious, SHOOT' EM UP is very openly honest about being Bugs Bunny meets SIN CITY, and we get one of the best action movies of this decade.
With this and the excellent THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and the junk-fun WAR, this summer actually ended good for me. Can't say I've said that before.
