Shoot ‘Em Up
Entertaining and instantly forgettable — appropriate for a movie named after the genre it celebrates. Starring Clive Owen as a military-trained lone gunman, Paul Giamatti as a sniveling, pimply-faced villain and Monica Bellucci as a lactating hooker, “Shoot ‘Em Up” strings together a series of gun battles, hanging them on an adequate plot with a few amusing ironic twists. But if this movie got people talking at all — it seems to have vanished from theaters a month after its release — they weren’t discussing the story. Instead, they may have remarked that they now know half-a-dozen ways to kill a man with a carrot. Writer-director Michael Davis has crafted a hyperviolent, live-action Looney Tunes feature, with Owen as the carrot-munching Bugs Bunny and Giamatti as the hapless Elmer Fudd. Davis is an occasionally witty, occasionally inventive action director. And he has an amusing breast (and breast-milk) fetish. Note the restaurant where the final scene takes place — it’s shaped like a giant mammary. I value moviemakers with this kind of naughty streak. But “Shoot ‘Em Up” offers only cheap and fleeting pleasures.