The “gleefully offensive” movie Roger Ebert knew he’d get hate mail for endorsing
An offensive movie isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it depends on how the filmmaker approaches the material and how any given audience member reacts. In one such case, Roger Ebert gave near top marks to a film, accepting that he was on course to receive hate mail for doing so.
It wasn’t a horror movie, though, since Ebert seemed to hate gratuitously violent and gore-heavy flicks more than any other niche subgenre. Gratuitously violent and gore-heavy action flicks, though? That’s an entirely different matter, with one batshit insane example leaving the critic giddy with glee.
Anyone who’s seen writer and director Michael Davis’ self-explanatory 2007 offering, Shoot ‘Em Up, knows that it’s both fucking bonkers and delivers exactly what you’d expect from the title. From the first scene, it’s completely and utterly preposterous, made all the more entertaining by every single member of the cast, with the exception of a scenery-inhaling Paul Giamatti, playing it completely straight.
In the first act alone, Clive Owen uses a carrot as a deadly weapon, helps deliver a baby, and then engages in a balletic gunfight while holding said baby. Later on, he also takes part in another gun battle, this time while mid-coitus, to offer an idea of just how unnecessarily far-fetched things become.
We haven’t even mentioned the plot yet, which is predicated entirely on Owen’s Mr Smith doing everything he can to protect the newborn from Giamatti’s megalomaniacal villain, who’s been tasked by a crooked United States senator to harvest the kid’s bone marrow to prolong his own life.
In a rousing 3.5-star review, Ebert described Shoot ‘Em Up as “the most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture” that he’d seen in years. Alluding to his own misgivings about hating certain pictures that push the boundaries of bad taste, he was kind enough to address the double-standard.
“I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far,” he explained. “This one goes so far, if you even want to get that far, you have to start halfway there, which means you have to be a connoisseur of the hard-boiled action genre and its serio-comic subdivision (or sub-basement).”
He also correctly guessed that Shoot ‘Em Up would become a cult classic among genre aficionados, theorising that it had all of the necessary tools to become “some kind of legend in the murky depths of extreme action,” and those qualifications were only enhanced when it did what every cult classic needs to do and flopped in cinemas.
Still, he was aware that it wouldn’t be for everyone. Despite falling just half a star short of top marks, Ebert had the sneaking suspicion that some viewers may not agree with his glowing praise: “Man, am I gonna get mail from people who hate this picture.” Then again, the people who love it, like him, really loved it.
