Ray Pride

Not many people have asked the question, "What if you took the hospital scene from John Woo's 'Hard Boiled' with Chow Yun-Fat holding a gun and a baby and extended it to over ninety minutes?" but I'm glad Michael Davis did.

The answer is "Shoot 'Em Up," an overheated funhouse of an action movie, with fifteen or so action set pieces and a dozen involving absurd amounts of gunplay, mostly of dazzling design. Writer-director Michael Davis starts literally with a bang, the New Line Cinema logo getting its sprocket holes from bursts of gunfire. Clive Owen is Mr. Smith, a reformed agent whom everyone suggests a back-story for (but he's not telling). In the opening scene, waiting on a bus bench and munching on a carrot, Smith watches as a pregnant woman is chased into an alley by a thug. A few beats is all it takes to thrust him into the middle of a gunfight that takes place as the woman gives birth on a warehouse floor. Paul Giamatti is the over-the-top gang boss who, for some reason, wants the baby and wants it now. Cue incomprehensible plot convolutions, punny humor, movie references, a mid-air free-fall gunfight and Monica Bellucci as a past flame of Mr. Smith who's thrust into the midst of one battle royale while wrapped around the gunman mid-coitus, mid-air and up against a wall. The camerawork is by Peter Pau, who also shot "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and it's the acrobatics of Davis' style that impress rather than his pulp infractions. (Several supremely trashy moments are best left unremarked, including possibly a low point in Giamatti's career involving a murder victim, but he does get to relish the Wile E. Coyote moment the second time his character gets comeuppance, growling: "Fuck me sideways.")

An ebullient, gray-scruffed man in his late forties, with a distinct resemblance to latter-day Steven Spielberg, Davis has made a raft of direct-to-DVD comedies and horror, but also worked as a storyboard artist, which made the $37 million "Shoot 'Em Up" possible: Davis penciled over 17,000 stick-figure drawings to make a fifteen-minute animatic, or animated reel of action sequences. Davis insists on handing over his iPod to show how the animation looks: like stick figures, but the choreography impressively conveys like the fast, furious result. "I love the fact that something that I did as a kid, this weird skill that I have, got me this opportunity." He's always been an action fanatic. "When I was a kid, I wrote my own James Bond novels. I was mad! I read all the Ian Flemings, then I wrote two, 100-page typed manuscripts. One was called 'Spearhead,' one was called 'Masquerade of Death.'" He offers up a photocopy of the book jacket he had mocked up, with a very young, even adorable photo of himself as a teen. "I was adorable! What happened?"

"Shoot 'Em Up" happens: the advent of the grungier-than-Daniel Craig "anti-Bond." "That's kind of a catchphrase for you guys to hook into the character. What I really wanted to create was a new action hero, something that I would love. The great thing about doing your own action hero is you can create your own mythology. If you look at the Bond movies, he's basically a static character, except in 'Casino Royale,' where he becomes this cold-blooded guy 'cos this girl cheated on him."

Davis speaks in the same sort of funhouse hyperbole as his movie. "I think Clive is one-third James bond, one-third Indiana Jones and one-third Dirty Harry. He's got all the pieces, Indy's vulnerable, Clive is vulnerable, Clive is handsome and suave like Bond, but he's also a little bit colder, more icy, like Dirty Harry. I didn't want to use [an actor] who'd been in a lot of action movies. Here, I've got a guy who is really damaged goods, he's pulled himself out of the world, he's angry at everything in the world, and then he gets stuck with this most innocent thing in the world. That's what compelled me, this hard-boiled character with a baby and the baby leads him to this woman who he had this past relationship with. There's something more going on because I’m not stuck with any existing character or formula. I think the action is great, wild and fun, but there's something compelling about this fractured family healing themselves."

So what about casting Monica Belucci as, well, a forever-lactating prostitute? "That's not my fetish! I wrote a screenplay about [Dr. Alfred] Kinsey a long time before the [version with] Liam Neeson, based on the first biography. Researching him, I discovered this whole world, like Kinsey did, of what people are doing behind close doors. And it's fascinating! And it's funny! And it says a lot about a character. That liberated my writing. Once I did Kinsey, all my writing became informed by what I learned. But I feel like movies, you should only put things in that support the premise. So here, you've got Clive Owen, he's stuck with this baby, what is he going to do? He's going to go to a woman who can help take care of it, help him feed it. The whole lactating thing, crazy as it is, makes sense in that world. Can you think of a better heroine that would be better? No!" Davis smiles like the happiest man on Earth.

"Shoot 'Em Up" opens Friday. The impressive animatics are at latinoreview.com/scriptreviews/shootemup/promoreel/index.html>

(2007-09-04)

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