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."
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)