Shooting blanks

When the Oscars were telecast in March, Hollywood basically went to sleep from about now till mid-October, when the first wave of prestige pictures went into release. With the Academy Awards bumped up to February, the jockeying now begins in earnest this month. I'd become used to vacating the multiplex for the arthouse for a few weeks, but double duty calls, what with a raft of promising new releases floating toward us, including a new David Cronenberg picture, Eastern Promises; Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan's The Brave One; Julie Taymor's Beatles tribute, Across the Universe, featuring our actor neighbor, Patrick O'Neill, and two Westerns, 3:10 to Yuma (an example of the kind of good, but non-iconic, no-baggage picture that should be remade, unlike Halloween, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Sleuth) and the artier The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, whose title will undoubtedly be shortened to "Jesse James" on space-strapped marquees.

There's good word on some of these. But even if they don't pan out, none will suck harder than the loathsome Shoot 'Em Up, which New Line Cinema is flushing into theaters Sept. 7. I've rarely been as uncomfortable in a screening room as I was at this geekshow, a quasi-parody of action pictures that, like Grindhouse and The Last Action Hero before it, will fail to satisfy genre junkies or anyone who thinks the genre is in need of a good ribbing. Though a smattering of critics drool over these mixed-intentions movies (the come-and-gone "fairy tale for hip grown-ups" Stardust would seem to be another) audiences rarely bite, and it's hard to imagine anyone getting with Shoot 'Em Up's agenda of shriekingly over-the-top ultra-violence and sledgehammer send-ups of family values politics. Trying to work around the iffy boxoffice appeal, the writer-director Michael Davis has turned up at interviews with a suitcase full of action movie DVDs, as proof of his sincerity in adding to the genre, not detracting from it. I'm not buying it; the 46-year-old Davis has struck out with slightly more upmarket fare, and Shoot 'Em Up seems more like revenge against blockbusters, and the audiences who patronize them.

Just as you should refrain from sending out poison-pen e-mails until you've really thought over the consequences, I wish Shoot 'Em Up had stayed a digital animatic, one that allegedly wowed Hollywood with its high testosterone levels. If it had stayed in that embryonic form, or maybe morphed into a videogame, the bulk of the moviegoing public might have remained blissfully unaware of its existence. Alas, producer Don Murphy, who cultivates a don't-tread-on-me image on blogs, bit hard, and is zealously defending the finished product on the web. Here's what we had to say to each other Aug. 9 on that movie mosh pit, Hollywood Elsewhere:

"However it was intended [straight-up action picture or parody], I thought Shoot 'Em Up was barrel-scraping garbage from beginning to end. The pits, the depths, the dregs, until someone or something lower arrives to churn the bottom anew." -- btwnproductions (my transparent nom-de-net).

"maybe that is why you are between productions- because you THOUGHT. Clearly this is not a strong past time for you. Stick to masturbating with sandpaper. It is more your speed." -- Don Murphy

"Sticks and stones, Mr. Murphy. You don't help your case by ranting. But maybe you're right; Shoot 'Em Up is a shade more intelligent than Transformers. " -- btwnproductions

And that was the last I heard from him on the subject. In a producing career that includes this summer's overripe-for-parody Transformers and Oliver Stone's low-blow Natural Born Killers, a spiritual cousin to the new outrage, Murphy has made exactly half of one good movie, 1998's Apt Pupil, which fell off the track at about the midpoint. Look, he's right to get in there and wrestle; Shoot 'Em Up is his pitifully malformed love child, and I don't blame him for speaking up for it. But his hot-headed and unfunny response belies a basic lack of sophistication thoroughly in sync with his cinematic track record, and that he fled from discussion, cowardice. I can only hope that his attitude is part-pose, but no wonder Hollywood is hell on Earth for true creative types.

So what is this movie that has me so riled up? This I will say: Shoot 'Em Up is worth devoting time to dispatching, unlike run-of-the-mill dogs that can be dismissed in a paragraph or two. It seeks to up the ante on amped-up fare like Sin City, whose finer qualities eluded me, and last year's underrated Running Scared, which was not afraid to reveal genuine heart underneath all its chest-thumping. It stars Clive Owen, who had a featured part in Sin City, here in a dumbed-down echo of his last, rather more brilliant, action-driven failure, Children of Men. He plays Mr. Smith, a mercenary of sorts, described as "the angriest man in the world," who delivers a working girl's baby amidst the first shoot 'em up of the title. A nebbishy-looking, henpecked, but death-dealing professional assassin, Hertz (Paul Giamatti), sends his minions after Smith, who hooks up with a another prostitute, DQ (Monica Bellucci), to figure out the angles between barrages of firepower. (All of the women in the film are hookers, eye candy, or completely nondescript.)

What plotline there is is pitched at such a high level of moronic silliness I suspect Davis and Murphy hope that critics will rise to the bait, just to squelch them for being humorless, can't-take-a-joke dolts, but here it is (you have been warned): The baby is the product of an artificial insemination program clandestinely run by an ailing politico who is an opponent of the gun lobby, represented in the film by a malign weapons peddler who is planning to expose the hypocrisy of the nemesis, who needs the infant essence to prolong his own life.

"Shoot 'em up," if I have to spell it out for you, has a double meaning, referring to the impregnated women. That's about the level of wit to Davis' screenplay, and it is not nearly enough to stamp the film as satire--and satire being boxoffice kryptonite, the movie tries, queasily, to have it both ways, to be the action film itself and the running, contemptuous commentary on movies of its ilk. When they materialize, the political sleaze elements are grubbily overstated, and so ludicrous they push you right out of the film, assuming you still had any interest in its bloodily cartoonish excesses. Shoot 'Em Up is vacantly mean-spirited without relief or insight.

Some of this might have been forgiven had the movie really delivered on its bullets-blazing promises. It doesn't. I chuckled at an early sight gag involving a lethal carrot, but it's repeated, another joke on an unwashed audience that the film's creators assume will laugh at anything. There is fairly clever staging of a gunfight in and around neon signage. After that, however, the rest is unbelievable CGI, inadequately rendered and much more reminiscent of the already forgotten Charlie's Angels pictures than John Woo or, God forbid, Jean-Pierre Melville, Davis' stated inspirations (or is this another tawdry private joke on the aspirations of action hacks who claim Woo and Melville as their inspirations?). Not even the most desperate action fan, clueless to the film's secondary agenda, will embrace its goofy parachuting gun battle. The action had to be better than its competition to give the movie any zest or focus, and it's uniformly worse. I will concede that the film ends in an energetic burst of animated credits, giving it a little of the cool it is too cool for, but I may have just been eternally grateful that its 93 minutes were finally spent.

I could go on, to chastise the flickeringly charismatic Owen for wasting some of his 15 minutes in the limelight, scold Giamatti for taking on a role that plays into the stereotype of a sweaty, grunting pig (complete with necrophiliac tendencies) and not away from it, as he has sensibly sought to do, and urge career counseling for the stony-looking Bellucci, who is overly enamored of victim parts (and, as a hooker whose lactating breasts are a prized asset, does only peekaboo nudity in a film where all the other women go at least topless). But here I will stop. You get the point, and unlike the makers of Shoot 'Em Up I won't belabor it.

Except for one thing. In a Aug. 30 Hollywood Elsewhere posting about the boxoffice shoot 'em up between his film and 3:10 to Yuma this Friday, Murphy, from somewhere out of the cyber-ether, interjected, "The tracking tells the tale, people have no interest in a western." I'd say the smart money is on the cowboys.