"Shoot Em Up" Review

Many action movies are, by their nature, pretty much cartoons. They feature action heroes that survive countless ordeals which would kill an ordinary person. They have villains that cackle and go overboard enough to rival cartoon lunatics. And logic holes are so big in the majority of action films, you might as well have the Looney Tunes gang there to defy gravity while they're at it. So, with that in mind, here's an action film that cuts out the middle man and goes right to being a live action cartoon display of violence. The title "Shoot 'Em Up" helps give it away as well.

A pregnant woman is running for her life, and fortunately runs past a man named Mr. Smith. Smith manages to kill scores of people while delivering the woman's baby, but she doesn't make it. Smith then has to keep the baby safe while shooting the hundred more bad guys after him, led by self proclaimed genius Mr. Hertz. That's pretty much the gist of it.

"Shoot 'Em Up" could almost be seen as an homage to the action movie genre. After all, many an action film that tries to take itself seriously are this stupid and ridiculous, so they cut out those parts and just have endless killing. But there's already something that falls under that kind of aim- they're called video games. And that's what "Shoot Em Up" is really, a video game where all the viewer's missing is a joystick to kill people on the screen on their own.