Shoot 'Em Up

I'm writing this immediately after writing my note about 3:10 to Yuma, which is on Monday 17 September. In some ways this movie was a good contrast to that movie. It did not once try to be anything like a Good Movie, and has been thoroughly snubbed by critics for precisely that reason. Well, and it's just not as good of a movie as Yuma, but it's not as much worse as the Metacritic score might lead to one to believe. (Ebert, at least, sorta gets it.)

The basic problem with this movie is that it is never as clever as it wants to be. Really, the only thing that I thought worked on all of the levels it wanted to was the part in the opening sequence when Clive Owen's character shoots the umbilical chord after realizing that he doesn't have anything else to cut it with. Actually, the whole delivering a baby during a shootout thing was very awesome. But too much else in the movie just fell flat. What was up with the carrot thing? The only good (not really good, actually) thing that seemed to come out of it was the "What's up, Doc," line, which at least managed to do for "wit" what much of the rest of movie did for "plot", "action", or whatever.

If this movie had come with a text opening explaining what year it was, what had happened to America after the nuclear war, etc., absolutely everything else about the movie could have stayed the same and it would have been a perfectly believable bad scifi movie, a la Judge Dredd or Demolition Man. All that would have been missing was some obligatory explanation of some High Tech weapon some random character would've felt compelled to make. But, even with that missing, I think it would have been completely buyable as a sci-fi action movie. I'm not sure what that means, other than that Hollywood seems to think that sci-fi seems to mean B-Action movie.

It really is too bad that Monica Bellucci isn't in more movies, though.