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

It's the unlikely spectacle of Giamatti bellowing, "Find me every wet nurse, lactating hooker and mammary on tap in the city!" that provide Shoot 'Em Up's comic highlights. His performance is a master class in cartoon creep -- from groping a dead woman's breasts to euthanizing his wounded minions -- in a role unlike any other. Some of this wasn't on the page. "It wasn't even really much of a part," Giamatti said. "We kinda made it up a little bit, took it a little bit on faith that we were gonna figure something out. We had a really good time doing it. But you can never tell what something's gonna end up like. It's such an odd movie, it's not everybody's cup of tea. But I like it a lot."

While there's some improvisation in there -- including Giamatti spitting the line "Well, fuck me sideways" -- what's cleverest is that Davis writes Hertz to answer the questions we should have about his Hans Gruber type of character. This is a bad guy with a private life and logistical concerns. Hertz has to balance his ultraviolence with calls from his wife about their son's birthday party, and he has to order up a new supply of black-leather-clad minions when Smith has thinned his herd. Crucially, he acts like a film director, referring to an attack as a "show."

Smith, meanwhile, is laden with so many godawful puns -- "Talk about shooting your load" -- that Clive Owen wisely chooses to just recite them, the only strategy to let the audience know he's groaning along with us. But our hero, too, has a back story more intriguing than most action heroes, including how, through gun-trafficking, he came to be responsible for the death of his wife and child. And he never loses sight of the fact that he -- and we -- are inside a film. "I hate those lame action movies where the good guy calls just one person who ends up betraying them," he tells Belucci, adding that he has instead called everybody -- all media, all cops, all agencies. Needless to say it doesn't make a difference, but it's the thought that counts.

All these movie smarts sadly meant nothing at the multiplex. Despite the mainstream crowd's love affair with slam-bang action, they stayed away from this ballistic missile of a B-movie. Producer Don Murphy's project, which cost around $40m, grossed just $12.8 million, while his other far-less-interesting spectacular of 2007, Transformers, raked in $319 million. It's hard to say why Shoot 'Em Up flopped, although it's tempting to think audiences don't want their pyrotechnics so over the top they cross over into parody, or their gratuitous blood-soaked violence served up with an anti-gun message.

Michael Davis, who to that point had done low-budget B- and T&A fodder like Monster Man and 100 Girls, hasn't made a movie since, although he's now attached to the Warner Bros. remake of Outland. A good thing, too, because he's a genuine talent. And he's not one to say die. After every studio had passed on Shoot 'Em Up, he re-pitched the project with 15 minutes of animatic sequences from the film that he'd hand-drawn over 17,000 frames. This cartoon famously included meta-commentary to describe itself as "This is John Woo's wet dream!" On that promise, Shoot 'Em Up certainly delivered.

Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)

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