In what was clearly a revenge attack for calling Boondock Saints Gun Porn, @networkaegis a.k.a. that bastard, decided to inflict Shoot ‘Em Up on me. Fortunately, this means you will read the review and he will be unable to inflict it on anyone else.

Shoot ‘Em Up is Gun Porn. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true.  Shoot ‘Em Up is Carrot Porn with some gun fights thrown in to try and make the Death-by-carrot scenes less ridiculous.  I fail to understand why writer/directors come up with a couple of cool ideas, in this case, Death-by-carrot, and then write a whole movie centered around it, complete with bad Bugs Bunny references.   It didn’t work for Wanted, and it sure as hell didn’t work for Shoot ‘Em Up.

Now, I kind of went off about the lack of plot in Boondock Saints.  Perhaps I was too hasty.  Shoot ‘Em Up makes Boondock Saints look positively Shakespearean in it’s scope.  This plot could be done in a tweet and there would still be room for pi.  Man rescues baby, shit happens, he kills everyone, with a carrot. (75 characters) Not only is there room for pi, it’s not even the rounded off short version you learnt at school (3.1416)  No, we’re talking full on memory testing pi.

Shoot ‘Em Up managed to get 5 Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, for 3 reasons, the skydiving gunfight, something I have not seen before, and it really should have been made longer, but by that stage I just wanted the pain to stop, so the brevity was appreciated,  and Death-by-carrot, twice.  Although, Death-by-carrot really should not have happened in the first scene.  I was kind of hoping after that that a whole array of vegetables would be used, perhaps death-by-potato or death-by-aubergine, but no, we got stuck with carrot.  And the eye stabbing death should have come before the skull piercing one, but that could just be my preference for dodginess in a movie increasing as the film rolls.  (In case you didn’t guess, Death-by-carrot got the dodgiest moment award)

It also managed a rare and dubious honour of getting 1 Mutant Smiley for rewatchability.  This film really is the proof that despite what many people think, there is a substantial difference between good dodgy and bad dodgy. It’s like the difference between a scooter and a Ducatti.  They both are technically motorbikes, but you wouldn’t be caught dead on a scooter.

One liners abound in Shoot ‘Em Up, and I have a theory about this.  I think the writer/director had a bet going with some drinking buddies to see who could get the most lines with sexual overtones into a script.  I really hope I don’t ever find the movies his drinking buddies wrote.  Still the best line in the movie does not have any innuendo in it, sexual or otherwise, but it won’t make the NRA happy either.  yes, I’m referring to “Guns don’t kill people! But they sure help.”

Shoot ‘Em Up was not a good film.  It was not an interesting 80 minute diversion.  It may have made for an interesting 5 minute diversion had I been aware enough to fastforward through everything except the Death-by-carrot scenes, but how would I be able to post any sort of waring if I did that.  Avoid this movie.  Don’t even consider watching it to find out what bad dodgy is.  In fact, the only reason I can think of to watch Shoot ‘Em Up is as part of a film class on learning how not to write an action film.  You hav been warned.

300 is a bit of a strange movie. I only realised during the final scene that it was a saga in the style of the Odyssey or any of those other historical Greek poems with visuals being used to avoid the long descriptions, which they felt were necessary to put in using a Narrator anyway. Maybe, if I had realised this earlier, I would have enjoyed it more, but I doubt it.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a film quite like 300. It had some gratuitous sex, lots of gratuitous violence and still almost managed to put me to sleep. How could a film based solely on a band of 300 men defying an army of thousands put you to sleep I hear you ask, and to tell the truth, I’m still puzzled at that one myself.

Maybe it was the number of slow motion impaling-death sequences they showed, like they were worried about running out of film during shooting so they used slow motion sequences to stretch 30 minutes of footage into a 90 minute film. Maybe, it was the half-hearted (and I’m probably being a little generous here) attempt at using any semblance of a plot so that the film didn’t consist solely of gratuitous violence, although that might have improved it. Or maybe it was the fact that the CGI was so appalling that the blood looked like solid chunks of rock and the wolf at the beginning, well, words cannot describe it. Suffice to say that if the narrator hadn’t told us it was a wolf, we’d still be wondering how the Spartans had managed to master genetic manipulation. All of these things combined to form a completely forgettable film and I find myself wondering how it got any reviews at all, nevermind any reviews that were positive.

A film consisting solely of gratuitous violence strung together with minor narrative really should score full marks on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Scale, but, seeing as how most of the combat sequences felt like repeats of the first one and the fact that if it wasn’t still light outside while I was watching it I would have fallen asleep, it only manages to score a 2. I should have realised when the film makers decided to unleash this monstrosity on the world at Comic Con and not at one of the film festivals that they realised how bad it was and tried to cover it up by doing something unusual. And it worked, they got their publicity, and won the dodgiest moment award. The second one without even trying.

Where some films suffer from ADD directors, and I’m thinking of Aeon Flux in particular, this one seems to have a director hopped up on serious dinosaur tranquilisers. Maybe the slow motion sequences would seem to be real time if I was stoned out of my bracket, and that might have been the secret ingredient I was missing while watching. However, watching in real time was so bad that you had time to leave the room, make a cup of tea, and return before the spear had finished going through the body of a Persian soldier. But, to it’s credit, 300 just managed to avoid getting the not-so-coveted Anti-Nike and scored a 1 on the rewatchability index.

When you spend half the movie trying to place the voice of the Narrator, (who is the monk in Van Helsing that invents all the cool equipment), it’s not likely that you remember too many quotes. Fortunately, IMDB comes to the rescue, and a quick browse of what people think are the memorable quotes reveals that I didn’t miss too much. The only one that is vaguely memorable is because of the foreshadowing inherent in the quote. “Our arrows shall blot out the sun” “Then we will fight in the shade” and lets face it, it’s not a very good one.

Unless you have a morbid curiosity and insist on watching things to see if they are as bad as people tell you, or have an insatiable lust for gore, 300 can stay in the DVD case in the shop. You may want to watch it if it comes out on television and it’s free, but I am sure you will have better things to do with your time, like learning why cat bathing is considered a martial art, or if all else fails, watching paint dry. You won’t be missing anything by skipping this one.

I went into this film knowing a few things.  I knew Nicholas Cage would have emo-esque angst, I knew that at some point numerology would be mentioned, and I knew that Nicholas Cage would summon his super-emo angst powers that can make grass cut itself at ten paces and save the world.  I was only right on two of these.

The whole first half of the movie I kept on wondering how John (Nicholas Cage) was going to save the world.  He figured out the code, with a little help from a scotch ring, no coincidence that the ring happened to highlight 9/11/09, it couldn’t highlight some random date that had significance to John, like the date the hotel his wife was staying in burnt down.  But of course, that wouldn’t be transparent and easy for the audience to follow.

After he’s tried and failed to stop the second disaster I started to realise that, at last, someone had made an end-of-the-world movie in which the hero fails, and the world ends.  I started trying to figure out how the world ends.  I didn’t have to wait for long.  In a real Deus Ex Machina, which is a standard plot device for dodgy movies, but this one was excessive, John realised that the world was going to be destroyed by a super solarflare.  This really pissed me off.  There were so many opportunities for the writer to foreshadow this, or, even better, not have him realise and let the world be destroyed by a real random act of god.

But this lack of foreshadowing wasn’t the worst thing about the movie. No, that dubious honour is reserved for the biblical nature of the ending. How did the test audiences not pick up that this was a somewhat less than subtle attempt to mock Genesis, at least they could have done something interesting with it and made them pastafarians.

Knowing almost managed to rate 3 Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, but the ending screwed up its chances. The cool disasters, like the plane crash deserved 3, but the dumb silent aliens and the fucking moronic ending forced me to drop the dodginess rating down to 2.

The only reason I can think of to watch this movie again is if you get off on the emo quality of Nicholas Cage’s acting. In fact, that’s pretty much the only reason i can think of to watch this movie once, and it started with such promise.

Unless, you want to witness Cage’s secret super emo power of being able to make grass cut itself at 10 paces, know that you should avoid this.

And Remember, We watch them so you don;t have to.

Whenever you have a bad run at anything, you can tell whether you have optimistic or pessimistic tendencies. You look at new things and think either “Oh great, another in a long line of crap,” or “maybe this one will be the turning point.” Unfortunately, if you get disappointed often enough it doesn’t matter how bright and cheerful a disposition you have, experience will soon wear you down until you begin to think about giving up. This is almost the point that I have reached.

The movie that pushed me to this point, if you could call it a movie as opposed to a complete waste of pixels is “Step Brothers” This crowning moment in the history of dull cinema stars Will Ferrell and John C Reilly as 40 year olds who still live with their respective single parents. They hate each other, then they learn a valuable lesson and become best friends. And pretty much, that’s about it, the movie in one sentence, and not even a very long one.

Now, you’d think that 40yr olds acting like 10 yr olds would be amusing. Unfortunately the execution of the idea was lacking. It was like going to the Serengeti and missing the migration.

Being crude merely to shock the audience, is no longer enough. At the time American Pie was made it may have been, after all, the apple pie scene was incredibly risqué at the time. Now, however, that would classify as standard cinema fair, and this is one of the problems with the current crop of films. What the level of crudity in a film tells you about is the maturity level of the director and the creative brilliance, or lack thereof that the writers are able to summon.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe I’ve finally outgrown this sort of movie, but then I look at the films in my collection and realise that the chances of that happening are about as good as anything starring Will Ferrell to have Oscar aspirations. Maybe I’ve just been incredibly unlucky in my choice of movies to watch and there are still some good ones around, or and this is my new theory, perhaps we are now getting all the movies that were made during the writers strike. The timing is correct, and it would explain why movies that seem to lack pace, direction and originality or formulaic humour are the only ones I seem to be picking up off the DVD rack.

On to the ratings. The fact that you’ve read this far and only seen a couple of sentences about the movie should tell you how I feel, but I’m going to spell it out just so you can’t turn around and tell me that I wasn’t clear enough and you thought I was recommending this and that I know owe you what feels like 10 hours of your life back. The movie sucked. It scores a 1 on both the rewatchability index and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Scale.

I did however learn a valuable lesson while watching this film. If, at any point you find yourself thinking “I would rather be watching Aeon Flux” it’s time to turn off the DVD player or walk out of the cinema and go bang your head into a wall. At least that may have some point in that if you do it often or hard enough there is a chance that it could cause you to forget the pain and suffering you’ve just endured by something that is in clear violation of the Geneva convention and the people who green-lighted the film should be tried at the War Crimes Court.

We all have our gifts. For some it’s the ability to hit a little red ball nine times out of ten. For some, it’s being able to take a piece of wood and some metal wires and being able to belt out a tune that is remembered for generations. For me, it’s the ability to sit through just about any movie, no matter how dodgy it is. And recently, this skill has been sorely tested.

It all started with Leatherheads. This was followed up with Clerks II. I fail to understand how a movie that includes a donkey sex show could still manage to put me to sleep, yet it managed. Next came Hancock, more on that one at a later date, but what a sucky superhero weakness. Finally, came “The Promotion”.

From the cover it looked like it should be amusing. Sean William Scott and John C Reilly get to fight over a promotion in the cut-throat world of supermarket management. Hilarity and hijinks should have ensued, possibly coupled with the odd caw-caw and tooky tooky. Instead boredom and death defying dullness was what followed once play had been pressed.

The only part of the film that was at all memorable was during a speech in which it was promised that the supermarket chain, donaldson’s or stevenson’s or some name that you would remember if they had’ve inspired any degree of caring, would continue to provide trolleys with one wheel that doesn’t work. The fact that this is all I remember of the film speaks volumes.

Their may have been dodginess, but this has been wiped out by the overwhelming apathy, which is the only feeling inspired by the film. If given a choice between watching “The Promotion” or “Aeon Flux” I would have to choose the latter. At least that could be made amusing in a mystery science theatre 3000 way.

If you have to avoid one film this year, make sure that it’s this one.