p e n g u i n d e v i l

But, sadly, I sat through one of the worst films I have ever seen, maybe even worse than Bulletproof Monk! I don’ know, maybe I was just in a bad mood…

Anyway, so I watched Shoot ’em up. Why? Good gosh, why? Is it a remake of Children of Men? Well, no. It does though have Clive Owen encountering a pregnant lady being hotly pursued who he decides to protect. But it is quite possibly one of the worst movies I have ever had the misfortune of sitting through. Sure there is a lot of gun violence and some gore, both of which I am quite fond of. But that stuff is so thickly immersed in: a completely ridiculous script filed with ludicrous plot elements and amazingly terrible cliched lines, amateurly cliched scenes, and dumbly choreographed action. The endless wave of one liners aimed at ten year olds is so bad it makes you want to stutter and Clive’s seemingly psychic ability to piece together what is going on can be nothing but a cheap attempt to bring the “plot” to a conclusion that it never should be able to connect with. There are some scenes that could be entertaining, if they were well done or contained any element of suspense, and some that are so dumb they had no potential (including “Mr Smith” delivering a baby while shooting bad-guys, part of a seven minute opening spree that yields about a dozen dead bodies). And sadly, with how much gunfire is in this, the scenes are so trite that they may as well have been using capguns.

The story? Clive is sitting on a bench when a pregnant lady runs by being pursued by gun-toting badguys. He involves himself, kills everybody, delivers the baby, teams up with a lactating prostitute pal, and they spend the next hour running from the bad-guy (um… Paul Giamatti?) and killing probably about 100 of his hired guns. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do love “gun action movies”: everything from the Woo-Fat canon (even The Replacement Killers and Face/Off), The Returner, The Matrix… But those are all well choreographed, well made movies (okay, maybe some of them aren’t too high on the script area), but this wasn’t even so bad it’s good. It was just plain bad. The worst, dullest and most ridiculously plotted ho-hum gun action film I’ve seen, similar in its unwatchable dumbness to Bulletproof Monk. In short, I can’t recommend this to anyone. Maybe if you are a ten year old boy who dreams of taking a badly written comic book and turning it into an amateurish John Woo knock-off with no sense of style, you might find it exciting. But hopefully even then you would be discerning enough to realize that it fails terribly in all aspects of its execution. My god… and wit.

my, aren’t we clever…

We also watched one of my old favorites. Colors. Honestly, I don’t think that this has aged badly. Sure some of the Bloods have a terribly dated sense of fashion, but still. Now, when I used to watch this frequently, I had always wished that when I would have recorded it I would have hit pause whenever the dull police bonding scenes were on. But now, I think that they are alright. I just don’t like Sean Penn or Maria Conchito Alonso. But it’s actually a pretty fun movie. Sean Penn is a new policeman on LA’s gang squad and his rough macho methods conflict with his “old hand” partners more neighborly ways. And on top of that, he ends up being a symbol of police brutality to the locals. But they go out patrolling the turf and, of course, there is love, and police shootings and car chases and bloods and crips shooting each other and throwing up their signs. There is also a good cast, and I was surprised to realize that the main villain, a crip named “Rocket” is played by Don Cheadle and it also features Trinidad Silva and “the funny brother” Damon Wayans (as T-bone, the wacky guy).

Oh, and the music. The background/mood/action music by Herbie Hancock is a bit dull and dated, but the soundtrack has some choice moments: Ice -T’s “Colors” theme is a classic, and it also has bits by Kool-G-Rap and the 7A3, who were two of my fav’s back in the day.