Paul Giamatti on the Lost, Cold-Blooded Joys of Shoot 'Em Up

Exhausted the classic canon? Fed up with the current cinema of remakes, reboots and reimaginings? This week The Cold Case talks to Paul Giamatti, exhuming a recent, underappreciated gem by one of America's most charismatic acting talents.

Finding unexpected fame as a comic-book artist, railing against the evils of merlot, tangling with a backyard mermaid or trying to retrieve his soul from Russian gangsters: Paul Giamatti has blessed a disparate bunch of movies with his human hurrumph persona. But what unites these roles (and many of his others) is that familiar beaten-down frustration. Which is why it was such fun to see him do a 180-degree turn to play a snarlingly confident and utterly cold-blooded villain 2007's Shoot 'Em Up.

He's Hertz -- no phonetic subtlety here, folks -- in pursuit of Clive Owen's Smith or, more to the point, the newborn baby our mysterious hero is protecting. But Giamatti wielding a massive gun as he cracks wise and literally blasts butt is just one of Shoot 'Em Up's many surprising pleasures. Writer-director Michael Davis doesn't just break the fourth wall with his film, he gleefully blows it away. Beginning with the New Line Cinema logo getting its sprockets as bullet holes and culminating with an end-credit sequence that takes the Bond franchise's link between guns and gals to its ridiculous conclusion, Davis always wants us keenly aware that this is a movie.

Yet, crucially, Shoot 'Em Up obeys the laws of its own universe. Davis doesn't cheat us just because he's dealing in artifice. The fight and action scenes are choreographed, shot and cut with Bourne-level brilliance, always refreshing in an era when such sequences far too often become a perversely dull blur of whip-panning cameras and epilepsy-inducing edits.

The initial action sequence sees Smith defending a hunted, heavily pregnant woman. He offs his first bad guy -- like some black-ops Bugs Bunny -- with one of his beloved carrots, before shooting up another eight of Hertz's minions. All this in less than 60 seconds. Then Smith turns his gun on us to fire at us (we're his 10th victim) and to blast out the Shoot 'Em Up title. Without drawing breath, he dives back into the action to dispatch more goons, who are unloading on him as he calmly delivers the woman's baby.

The law of action movies dictates that each sequence should out-do the last. Amazingly, it's here that Shoot 'Em Up excels with scenes that are comically but thrillingly orchestrated. When Hertz has the now orphaned baby in his sniper sights after Smith has tried to abandon it on a merry-go-round, our hero must shoot the playground attraction's railings to make it spin ever faster so bub won't be clipped by a bad-guy bullet. Then there's Smith diving down a multi-story stairwell, shooting dozens of ascending minions as he goes, or taking out another half-dozen henchmen who bust in on him while he and Monica Belluci are having sex. That the musical choices don't falter -- Nirvana, Motorhead, Iggy Pop, AC/DC's and Motley Crue -- make this an action flick with an irresistible and authentic punk-metal sensibility, rather than some by-the-numbers effort lazily scored with Limp Bizkit or their ilk.

Keeping pace with the whizzing bullets and wailing guitars is a plot which adheres to the genre conventions but kicks them up to po-faced absurdity: Belluci's hooker with a heart of gold conveniently specializes in lactation, which comes in handy to feed junior. She and Smith quite smartly buy the baby and bullet-proof jacket and hide-out in an M-24 tank in a museum; naturally Hertz is in service of a baby-breeding political conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top.

It was Michael Davis's enthusiasm and eccentricity that got Giamatti interested in such a left-field role. "The director was a really eccentric guy," the actor told me a couple weeks ago from Montreal, where he was working on Barney's Version with Dustin Hoffman. "Very eccentric," he laughed. "But I liked him a lot."

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