Late at night, in an unnamed U.S. city, a solitary man sits at a bus stop. A pregnant woman runs by, pursued by a man with a gun. With reluctance, the man at the bus stop rescues her and assists with the baby’s delivery, while additional pursuers fire at them, including the gang’s particularly nasty leader, an intuitive man named Hertz. Our hero, known only as Smith, determines to save the child and find out why Hertz wants the baby dead. At a local bordello, he tries to employ a lactating hooker to watch the child, but things quickly escalate, and this makeshift family is soon on the run. Heavy metal music calms the baby. Why? A laboratory, gun factory, and presidential campaign all figure in Smith’s quest for the child’s safe deliverance. —IMDb
A modern day, R-rated Bugs Bunny cartoon right down to the affinity for carrots and the Elmer Fudd-looking Giamatti.
Ironically, this is a sort of anti-hollywoodian movie. Pushing several and typical symbols and stylemes of Hollywood's great narrative to the edge of the ridiculous, Shoot'Em Up dismantles the apparatus of the mainstream movie. It's like a suicide for a right cause: making us know the vacuity of certain kind of cinema. And it's a quite funny watch, anyway.
The most fun i've had watching an action movie since Die Hard came out in 1988. Shoot 'Em Up should have been a major hit. Incredibly, this picture lost money. Do not let that stop you from checking it out. A helluva lot of fun in the way only wildly preposterous guilty pleasures can be. So gleefully over-the-top it makes John Woo look like a sissy.
Voilà un film qui a connu un bon bide au cinéma alors qu’il mériterait pourtant plus d’attention. Mais peut-être que le film de Michael Davis, Shoot’Em Up, n’est pas sorti dans les meilleures circonstances… read review