Shoot 'Em Up

A man with no name helps a woman give birth at a bus stop, she is killed, and he runs with the baby. The rest of the film is one uninterrupted gunfight. Michael Davis got the idea watching John Woo's Hard Boiled, specifically the sequence where Chow Yun-fat rescues newborns from gangsters. He pitched it to producers Don Murphy and Susan Montford using an animatic he made with simple digital tools, and it went from there to New Line. Clive Owen did most of his own stunts. The carrot running through the film is a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd reference. The sequence that runs a gunfight and sex simultaneously is the most discussed thing in it, and the marketing campaign's fake bulletproof stroller caused an argument of its own. Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci fill out the cast. Against a 39 million dollar budget it grossed 26.8 million worldwide, so it failed. Critics split hard. Roger Ebert called it the most audacious, implausible and cheerfully offensive action film, while A. O. Scott dismissed it as a worthless piece of garbage. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 67 percent and Metacritic at 49, and it later landed at 111 on Rotten Tomatoes' essential action movies list. Who it is for: viewers who want cartoon action with no claim to realism. Who it is not for: anyone looking for logic or character. The film openly refuses both.