Shoot 'Em Up (2007)

Michael Davis conceived this film after watching a scene from Hard Boiled in which Chow Yun-fat rescues an infant mid-gunfight, and he resolved to build an entire feature around that image, minus the explosions. What he produced is eighty-six minutes of firearms choreography, stitched to a plot about a drifter named Smith, a prostitute named Donna, and a newborn who serves as a bone marrow donor for a senator with cancer. Eighty firearms were reportedly used in production. Six thousand squibs. A carrot functions as a murder weapon. The film knows precisely what it is, and what it is has no interest in the culture wars.

The casting is overwhelmingly white, with Monica Bellucci as the sole non-Anglo presence of note, and no discernible design behind that arrangement. There is no LGBTQ content of any kind. Donna is described by her performer as an independent woman, though she spends her screen time as a gold-hearted prostitute, a damsel, and a love interest who has intercourse during a gunfight. The film engages no racial themes, no environmental concerns, no body-positivity conversation, and no neurodivergent characters. It is a fictional action romp, so history remains unrevised.

Where the picture flirts with a message, it does so sardonically. The villain is a weapons manufacturer named Hammerson who bribes a presidential candidate to protect gun rights, and a senator who favors stricter gun laws gets assassinated for the trouble. This is the shape of a critique aimed at corporate influence, though it arrives wrapped in a Looney Tunes gag about Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The politics are decoration on a bullet. The film was banned from advertising in the United Kingdom for glorifying gun crime, a charge it would likely accept as a compliment.