Hollywood is F***ing Dumb.

This post is primarily a movie review, but it is also politically relevant.

I was suffering a bit of insomnia last night and flipped to HBO after the ESPN bonus coverage of the MNF Packer-Viking game. The movie in progress was Shoot 'Em Up, an action movie that aspired to the slick stylings of the latest James Bond films, and with similar star power; Clive Owen played the dashing but dour, square-jawed hero to Paul Giamatti's archetypal one-dimensional completely evil villain.

The plot of the movie, if you can call it that, is that the hero, Smith, is trying to uncover some conspiracy that has something to do with infant bone marrow and a Democrat senator who is the front runner for the presidency because of his anti-gun stance. He's also a cripple and needs the marrow, so he's icky because he's breeding babies for the sole purpose of harvesting the marrow to treat himself. Unfortunately for the senator the major gun manufacturer has caught on and kills all the babies, except one, which has been saved by Smith.

The gun king has employed Paul Giamatti to find and kill the last baby to cover their tracks, so Paul, who just knows people, which is how it's explained that he is able to find Smith so easily, hires about 50 goons with automatic weapons to storm Smith's abandoned warehouse safehouse.

Unfortunately for Smith, he wasn't able to afford all the guns he wanted, so he gets a single box of shells for his pistol.

Now, there's also a woman in the film who's sole purpose is to breastfeed this baby Smith is trying to keep safe, but she's clearly a romantic interest if only Smith wasn't so disturbed.

I probably missed the part at the beginning of the movie where the story explains how Smith is so good at killing things, but it doesn't really matter. We do know that he has really good vision because he eats lots of carrots.

Once the goons start assaulting the warehouse, Smith kills nearly all of them. At first, because he has to conserve ammo, he kills about 10 guys with a single shot at each, all the while he's running directly at them and carrying the baby in his left arm. That's right - he's carrying the baby the whole time. Miraculously, none of the goons can hit him with their automatic weapons from 10 feet away, even as he has to rush them and wait for the perfect shot to conserve ammo. At the end of this scene he manages to pick up one of the sub-machine guns off a dead goon, jump out to a zip wire extending from the ceiling into the large, open square stairwell, and while he's spinning around and zipping down the line, he's shooting the goons on the stairwell, all while cradling the baby. He kills dozens of guys on his 10 second descent to the floor, all the while every one of them is shooting back, but they just can't seem to hit him. Rambo never had it so good. Heck, parodies of Rambo never had it so good. I couldn't help but think of Weird Al's hilarious spoof in UHF. That's pretty much the idea here.

In a subsequent scene the goons have him cornered in a warehouse full of guns, and to get away he fires his pistols in opposite directions while looking and running in a third, and of course the goons are both shot in the head. And then he has all these guns taped to posts that he's controlling with string and the rest of the goons just keep running into bullets. There's a quick second where he has to run to the next set of strings and the goons are following - two guys are literally within arms reach of Smith and firing their machine guns directly into his back at point-blank range and he is miraculously unharmed. The he escapes in a car and ends up crashing into a van full of goons, flying through both windshields and then neatly dispatching 6 more guys who don't even shoot back. I think his one-liner was something like, "Who says seat belts save lives?"

Smith then goes to meet with the senator, who it turns out is working with the gun manufacturers. So Smith kills the senator and jumps our of his plane and kills 20 more goons as he's plummeting to the ground.

Wait, it gets better. So Paul finally captures Smith and breaks some of his fingers and is about to cut his eye out and Smith headbutts Paul and then pushes the exacto knife through his own hand so he can whack goons in the face with it. The he sprays the gun king with blood squirting out of his hand and kills that guy, but he can't shoot straight with his broken hands so he can't kill Paul, who apparently would rather be shot at and taunt Smith than actually kill him. Paul's motivation for not killing Smith is that he has to be right about him because he knows people so well, so he's just wants Smith to confirm his ideas before he can kill him - typical stupid villain stuff.

So finally Paul is about to shoot Smith, who is sitting next to a fireplace with a roaring fire - we're not sure why, and then Smith reveals a handful of bullets, which he holds to the fire while aiming his hand at Paul, and of course the bullets fire out of his hand like a gun and Paul gets all shot up.

That's not even the end but I won't spoil it for you.

This movie takes comic violence to a new level, and I guess it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, except it's clearly not funny or even remotely clever. It's just stupid, with each action sequence more ridiculous than the last.

The movie is supposed to have an anti-gun message, but every single character, except for the baby, glorifies in the gun violence to such an extreme that it has the exact opposite effect. There's even an absurd line of dialog when Smith finds out the senator is working with the gun king; he says, "You know what I hate? Hypocrites." Except he's the biggest hypocrite of them all because supposedly despises the gun manufacturers while all he does in this movie is kill about 100 people with a gun. Giamatti has a similarly terrible line. "Guns don't kill people, but they help."

I get that that is supposed to be commentary on the pro-gun groups, and that the movie itself is some kind of statement about gun violence. But it's just so stupid and unbelievable in it's action sequences and characterizations that it comes off as a piece of Hollywood slop. It also suffers from the uniquely liberal trait of being unable to be a self-parody, because it tries to be serious even through the cartoon violence.

Somehow the Rotten Tomatoes crowd gave this thing good marks, but in the sort of self-loathing way that they also like Zombieland, the difference being that Zombieland knows what it is all about and Shoot 'Em Up clearly does not.

Clive Owen has made a few of these movies the past few years where his character is involved in some liberal silliness to fight evil corporations and whatnot, so I'm not surprised he took this role, even though this is clearly a B-movie. That he was passed over for the role of Bond is obviously a good thing. Paul Giamatti I can't figure. He has talent, and should not have relegated himself to the nonsense of this villain, more appropriate for a lesser-known actor not interested in a serious career. If not for John Adams, this role might have been the death knell in his own career.

Once again, Hollywood has made an absolute garbage movie that fails to either educate or entertain, and takes these absurd shots at conservative principles that miss the mark no less dramatically than the endless stream of extras who can't seem to kill the very unlikeable main character.

By the way, here are my bottom 5 most awful movies I've ever seen most of:

5. Tomb Raider
4. Joe Dirt
3. Freddie Got Fingered
2. Mannequin Too
1. Shoot 'Em Up

Yep, this one was that bad!