BANG! BANG! BOOM! BOOM! And that’s about it.
Don’t get me wrong you don’t pay to see a film named Shoot ‘em Up and expect to see Oscar winning performances or great character development, but I was expecting to see some decent eye candy and some interesting gun fights to stimulate the senses. Unfortunately that just wasn’t delivered. After gun fight after gun fight followed by cliché after cliché, it all gets very boring very fast.
Firstly lets just point out that it is possible to have a decent story, good dialogue, interesting characters and then have you’re cool gun fights all included in one film. Why because you’re selling your film on a lot of ‘unique’ gun fights you think it gives you the right to ignore everything else that goes into making a good film I don’t know. The thing is, if these action sequences were spectacular or really pulled you in and amazed you, then maybe paying for some eye candy would be worth it. But just firing a lot of guns and turning on some heavy metal music does not make a good action sequence or hold the attention of the audience for an hour and a half. It just becomes a bit mundane and tedious.
Then there’s also the fact you don’t care about any of the characters, so there is no tension at all, and after you see Mr Smith miraculously dodging thousands of bullets for the hundredth time, there is very little to hold your interest.
The one liners are appalling, just down right awful and predictable, like a illiterate retarded 12 year old boy wrote them after reading his first porno.
The main baddie Mr Hurtz (wow, another slice of originality), I just didn’t like at all, but not in a cool ‘I hate that villain because he’s a bad ass’ way, more of because he’s sleazy, completely underwritten and a waste of a character annoyance.
After seeing the animated action sequences (that the director made in order to sell this film) a couple of years ago, I was genuinely impressed and couldn’t wait to see the final product, but something was lost in translation. Not the action, as it’s virtually shot for shot the same as the animatics, but more to do with the fact it doesn’t hold together as a film. Maybe it should have been released as six 5-minute shorts on the Internet, or something that people could download and just forget about the story all together (because they seemed to anyway) and enjoy some of the unique stuff in the gun fights in small doses. When it’s all cluttered and as frequent as in the film, the magic is lost.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not entirely bad, there is some decent imagination on display here, I was just underwhelmed I guess. It most definitely is not John Woo’s wet dream.
The thing I enjoyed the most about the film was Monica Belluci, she oozes sex appeal from head to toe and her character is probably the only one with more then a sentence of back-story.
So overall, the film is mediocre. The action is good, but everything is too samey to actually stand-out, and the rest (e.g. characters, story, etc) was left on the back burner.
I’d wait for it to be on TV to be honest.
Don’t get me wrong you don’t pay to see a film named Shoot ‘em Up and expect to see Oscar winning performances or great character development, but I was expecting to see some decent eye candy and some interesting gun fights to stimulate the senses. Unfortunately that just wasn’t delivered. After gun fight after gun fight followed by cliché after cliché, it all gets very boring very fast.
Firstly lets just point out that it is possible to have a decent story, good dialogue, interesting characters and then have you’re cool gun fights all included in one film. Why because you’re selling your film on a lot of ‘unique’ gun fights you think it gives you the right to ignore everything else that goes into making a good film I don’t know. The thing is, if these action sequences were spectacular or really pulled you in and amazed you, then maybe paying for some eye candy would be worth it. But just firing a lot of guns and turning on some heavy metal music does not make a good action sequence or hold the attention of the audience for an hour and a half. It just becomes a bit mundane and tedious.
Then there’s also the fact you don’t care about any of the characters, so there is no tension at all, and after you see Mr Smith miraculously dodging thousands of bullets for the hundredth time, there is very little to hold your interest.
The one liners are appalling, just down right awful and predictable, like a illiterate retarded 12 year old boy wrote them after reading his first porno.
The main baddie Mr Hurtz (wow, another slice of originality), I just didn’t like at all, but not in a cool ‘I hate that villain because he’s a bad ass’ way, more of because he’s sleazy, completely underwritten and a waste of a character annoyance.
After seeing the animated action sequences (that the director made in order to sell this film) a couple of years ago, I was genuinely impressed and couldn’t wait to see the final product, but something was lost in translation. Not the action, as it’s virtually shot for shot the same as the animatics, but more to do with the fact it doesn’t hold together as a film. Maybe it should have been released as six 5-minute shorts on the Internet, or something that people could download and just forget about the story all together (because they seemed to anyway) and enjoy some of the unique stuff in the gun fights in small doses. When it’s all cluttered and as frequent as in the film, the magic is lost.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not entirely bad, there is some decent imagination on display here, I was just underwhelmed I guess. It most definitely is not John Woo’s wet dream.
The thing I enjoyed the most about the film was Monica Belluci, she oozes sex appeal from head to toe and her character is probably the only one with more then a sentence of back-story.
So overall, the film is mediocre. The action is good, but everything is too samey to actually stand-out, and the rest (e.g. characters, story, etc) was left on the back burner.
I’d wait for it to be on TV to be honest.
4/10
