Movie Review: Shoot Em Up

So I finished watching the movie Shoot Em Up last night. To summarize it I would compare it to a Zombie movie, without the zombies. Instead our hero is ambushed by wave after wave of government military types and hired bad-guy mercenaries. It is also comparable to zombie movies in that the plot is complete crap. Realism is tossed out the window, much the way that our hero is launched through the windshield during a head-on collision and lands guns-a-blazing in the other vehicle. So unbelievable that I had to laugh. And at times during the film I considered that perhaps the film is taken so far over the edge as to make a point of how outlandish things are even when not taken to this extreme. Shoot Em Up also reminded me a lot of the newest Rambo movie that came out not so long ago. Both movies are basically blood-bath films where the whole point of the movie is to rack up as big and as gruesome of a body count as possible.


I guess I'll start out with the good things.

The film itself is a great looking picture. I watched the Blu-Ray version, and I have to say that it is a very visually compelling picture. A wide variety of scenes and some top-notch special effect means that your eyes won't grow tired of watching it. I think this is the strongest point of the movie. Eye candy. Nice gory gut shots, with gobs of red gooey stuff flying in every which direction. The guns used in the filming are featured heavily to the point I think the actual firearms become a character of their own. And while I'm not a big gun nut, they did look very nice and beefy. The sounds in the film are also very good, with nice meaty crunches and well done bullet sounds.

Okay one other thing worth a mention. The actress playing the female co-star is smoking hot. And in my very novice opinion she did a very good job of delivering her lines and not seeming glued onto the production. After just looking up her bio, I realized that I knew all of this already. She is the Italian model/actress Monica Bellucci, who was Persephone in the Matrix movies. Very nice. Sexy time.


Ok so onto the bad.

Mainly.... the plot. Whooooo boy what a pile of crap. They try to give the main guy a backstory, but mostly fail at it. Was I supposed to feel complete once they revealed that the main character has a tragic past? Like up until that point I thought he was a just a regular guy, and couldn't understand why he would like shooting people so much? And then bam the lightbulb goes off and "Oh wow! I get it! He was scarred by some stuff in the past, that makes so much more sense!"

And I kind of think that near the end there is supposed to be a twist, but by that point I had completely given up on trying to understand the reasoning behind the massacre on the screen, and just began to accept it for what it was. A zombie movie without zombies. And not even a good one like Shaun of the Dead.

Ok so after all of that, I give it a 2 out of 5 rating, on mainly the fact that the visuals are very good, there were a few moments that gave me a small laugh (I'm not sure if it was intentional or not), and that Monica is very nice on the eyes.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this movie in the comments section if you wish.