Shoot 'Em Up is a campy comic book of a failure that piles up bodies faster than a FEMA rescue effort. It figures. Writer/director Michael Davis' previous helming of such silly romances as "Girl Fever" and "Eight Days a Week" makes him about as qualified to direct an action movie as managing a horse show qualifies someone to direct a federal agency.

The film stars Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci, a catchy rock score, and a semi-trailer load of bullets. The bullets clearly had the better acting coach. Within the first two minutes, Clive Owen as Smith gets a seriously determined look on his face and manages to hold that same expression for the film's remaining 78 minutes. Smith delivers a baby in a slum's back alley (the mother clearly having the same health insurance my family has) and then must protect this baby from endless squads of hit men who are mysteriously trying to make sure the baby never wakes anybody up for a 2-A.M. feeding. Smith is aided by Donna (Monica Bellucci), a beautiful hooker with a heart of gold. Please note that I've spent decades on a totally futile personal quest to find a hooker that is either beautiful or is endowed with a heart of gold. So how come the hookers in every other movie are both?

Paul Giamatti is badly miscast as a monstrous baby-killing psychopath but instead comes across as a huggable little Cabbage Patch Doll of a hit man. Both Giamatti and Owen play their characters with a campy coolness that Roger Moore would envy. (Moore would no doubt envy anybody with any substantial role in any movie these days, so I'm not sure this comparison is appropriate) Smith's coolness is so unshakable that when a half-dozen bad guys bust in to his hotel room and try to kill him while he and Donna are doing the love bump, he dispatches them to that great voyeuristic vantage point in the sky all the while continuing to take care of business. What a man!

Way back in The Day, my friends and I were curious as to what exact body count Clint Eastwood racked up in "Magnum Force". This was second in a series of Dirty Harry movies that were made so long ago that in the first few, Eastwood was actually young enough to have been a cop and Tyne Daily (co-starring in the third Harry) was merely annoying and had not yet grown repulsive. My buds and I stayed in the theater and viewed the film a second time and we learned that Harry Callahan had shot to death forty-seven law breakers. Owen's Smith dispatched nearly that many bad guys before the opening credits were through. As happened thirty-four years ago, I was again curious as to what the body count in Shoot 'Em Up actually was, but you'd have to be one sick f**k to sit through that gore fest again.

The answer is 179.

The amount of ammunition used in this film, coupled with the bad acting and comic book plot, will assure that 80 minutes spent watching Shoot 'Em Up will result in an evening pretty well shot.

--Coaster