Short Takes
This week in local theaters
SHOOT ’EM UP In this extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller, Clive Owen is Mr. Smith, a tough guy in a long leather coat who comes to the rescue of a screaming pregnant woman chased by a gun-toting creep. A warehouse shootout and birth ensues, and before long Mr. Smith is tucking the infant under his arm and ducking hired gun Paul Giamatti and an army of hitmen on his tail. Writer-director Michael Davis freely admits to lifting the idea for Shoot ’Em Up from the classic baby-in-peril hospital shootout in John Woo’s 1992 thriller Hard-Boiled, a strategy he expands by gleefully referencing Raising Arizona, The Matrix and the James Bond movies. Riffing on 007 is so old-hat as to be a sign of lazy screenwriting, but such jokes take on new resonance with the presence of rumored former Bond-to-be Owen. There’s no way to watch the Oscar-nominated Brit leaping and firing a gun in a single, elegant bound and not wonder anew just how close he came to landing the big part—the one that went instead to Daniel Craig, who may have simply out-pec’d Owen for the role of a lifetime. —Chuck Wilson (Opens Friday)
DEATH SENTENCE There’s no degree of separation between risk-assessment executive Kevin Bacon and the gangbangers who killed his son in the first of this season’s you-toucha-my-family-I-keel-you thumbscrewers—a gory anti-revengers’ tale seemingly resurrected from the catacombs of Cannon Films. (It’s based on a novel by Brian Garfield, reportedly written to counteract the pro-vigilante slant Hollywood gave his Death Wish.) The director, Sawteur James Wan, lays the genre mechanism bare—innocents will be placed in harm’s way; the hero will retaliate and become no better than the bad guys, until the bad guys do something even more heinous—and we, with a combination of sympathy and bloodlust, respond to each new zap with lizard-brain predictability. Or we would, if the movie weren’t so laughable in every common-sense detail—starting with Bacon’s instant transformation from pencil pusher to demolition man. (Lucky for Bacon, the gang accepts only pistol-packing Mr. Magoos who couldn’t hit Texas with Oklahoma—these numbnuts blaze away at the hero with the same flagrantly pathetic marksmanship that made Mark Twain plug James Fenimore Cooper.) A motif of father-son eye-for-an-eye overkill and some choice talk about the futility of war from an otherwise ineffectual detective (Aisha Tyler) raise the possibility that this is some kind of au-courant post-9/11 allegory. But the only things anyone’s likely to remember, besides Bacon’s crazy-eyes act, are John Goodman’s soon-to-be-legendary turn as a bilious bug-eyed gun dealer and a hellacious back-alley/parking-garage chase shot from a careening fender-level camera. Like much of the movie, it’s as dynamic in its hammy way as it is impossible to swallow. —Jim Ridley (Now playing)
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