Tonight was the second night of our “Movie Previews”. We were supposed to be seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof but for some reason it wasn’t being shown so we had our pick of movies. The best offering seemed to be Shoot Em Up – a crazy action movie featuring Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci and one of the silliest story-lines I’ve seen in a while. Strangely enough the movie has totally restored my faith in Clive Owen. He first came to my attention as King Arthur, a movie in which I totally loved him. But then I was totally turned off by him in Closer (though Jenny says that just shows how good an actor he was) and now I’m back to the loving him side.

Shoot Em Up is over the top, ludicrously violent, absurd, campy and just plain good fun. The movie opens with Clive Owen as a supposed bum minding his own business sitting at a bus stop drinking coffee and eating a carrot. A pregnant woman soon runs past him screaming and she is followed by a man threatening her menacingly with a gun. Damsel in distress? Clive Owen is soon on the job. The first sign of just how crazy this movie is, is the method of Clive Owen’s first kill – drilling the carrot through the back of the man’s head. Brutal and bloody much? During this opening action sequence the woman goes into labour and so with Clive Owen both coolly directing her to push and massacring the rest of the evil dudes, lead by villain Paul Giamatti, in interesting and imaginative ways a baby is born. The mother subsequently dies but Clive Owen’s conscience does not allow him to leave the baby behind. The rest of the movie tells of his baby-sitting experience, assisted along the way by a bunch of carrots and his, to be girlfriend, prostitute Monica Bellucci, and of his quest to find out exactly why the baby is being targeted for assassination.

The movie is almost cartoon like in both the number of deaths and in the way the lead characters, Clive Owen (good guy) and Giamatii (bad guy), never die despite all sorts of pain and kill shots being inflicted on them. The way Clive Owen somehow defies the laws of physics to escape Giamatii’s evil clutches time and time again add to this feeling.

There’s no true plot or logic to this movie but the story line serves its purpose of giving Clive Owen a vehicle to kick butt and that’s all I cared about. It is a surprisingly funny movie with witty one-liners from both Clive Owen and Giamatii though often you’ll find yourself laughing more at just how waaaay over the top the action scenes are. This is one of those movies that actually had the audience clapping at the end and for that I would definitely recommend it though you’ll have to put your brain in park first.