My Five Year Plan

I’m a bit behind the clock on getting a review of this thing up - truth be told, I only saw it this weekend as part of a plexing session with 3:10 to Yuma.

Shoot ‘Em Up is a lot of things - an ultraviolent action film about gun violence, action movies, and America and a pointed fuck you to the audience that would go in to the film looking for an ultraviolent action film. This is a film that tries to have it both ways, giving us Verhoeven-style action yucks while giving us Verhoeven-style hamfisted social commentary (well…). In a recent, lengthy piece in the Times, Michael Haneke was quoted on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, another film that does similar cultural work: “[Y]ou can’t make an antifascist statement using fascist methods.” Though Verhoeven complicates the question (indeed, in Robocop and Starship Troopers, the extreme violence and genre-fetishism serves to make the audience complicit in the fascistic display, as in Haneke’s work), it’s tougher to decide where Shoot ‘Em Up falls. The story of an anonymous agent (Clive Owen) trying to protect a baby from being assassinated by an evil goon (Paul Giamatti - terrifically broad, especially in the film’s shocking nod to necrophilia). The plot and characters are drawn as cartoonishly as possible, and the film contains massive laps in logic and chronology that would baffle even the most attentive viewer. This is a film that at one moment presents a bald deconstructive mockery of Hollywood action convention and the troubling ideology that underlies recent trends in action aesthetics (I’m looking at you, Paul Greengrass) and then delivers a stunningly ‘balletic’ Peter Pau-shot bit of bullet choreography that can’t be appreciated as much more than pure dick-waving spectacle.
That’s not an ideological statement. That’s nihilism.

And I think that’s probably director Michael Davis’ point.