Violent thrills and massive blood spills are the essence of the absurdly over-the-top action flick that is Shoot 'Em Up.

It pays tribute to Hong Kong action movies and is a kind of bullet-riddled spoof, awash in bloodshed. Though some sequences are eye-poppingly cool and the dark humor can be entertaining, this feels like a stylish exercise in absurdly excessive violence.

It's intended to be trashy fun, a guilty pleasure for fans of the action genre. Motivation, subtlety and character dimensionality are not a part of the equation, with cartoonish characters and nearly non-stop gunplay.

Clive Owen plays a man named Smith, a strong, silent type with amazing reflexes who finds himself in charge of an infant. In one of the movie's most startling scenes, he acts as midwife as the child's mother lies dying from a bullet wound. In the midst of a gunfight, Smith delivers the baby with one meaty hand and shoots at a room full of bad guys with the other. You can't help but wonder if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

The baby turns out to be at the center of a mystery that triggers a bevy of assassination attempts. Smith goes on to hunt down the archvillain (Paul Giamatti) seemingly behind the endless assaults. But first he heads off to the local brothel to a doe-eyed prostitute (Monica Bellucci), whose kinky specialty involves a large supply of baby bottles. While he fends off dozens of gunslingers, the baby still needs feeding.


The newborn is the real target, and when we finally find out why, the story falls apart. The effort to inject an element of political thriller into such a silly bloodfest doesn't work at all.

Fans of John Woo, Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino movies probably will enjoy Shoot 'Em Up. But for mainstream audiences, its whiplash pacing, frenetic camera work and offhand manner toward blood spillage probably will be disturbing.

Disappointingly, Giamatti and Bellucci fall flat, though for different reasons. Bellucci's wooden performance is perhaps intended to be laughable, but it's hard to tell. It seems as if the Italian-born actress learned her lines phonetically. Giamatti is ridiculously over the top, loopy without being funny. The film could have cast computer-generated actors in their roles, because it's all about the spectacular stunts and spewed guts.

But Owen is always worth watching. He smolders, casts withering glances and looks great in a leather jacket. He does a fine job wreaking havoc while protecting the innocent, but somehow it all seems a colossal waste of his considerable talents.