Summer Movie Review Roundup: Invasion of the Death Shooters

Thought I was free to move on to the much better movies of Oscar season, but I forgot about these three would-be thrillers I saw a while back.

SHOOT 'EM UP (C+)

I was really excited to see this one. I love Clive Owen. I love Paul Giamatti. I love action movies that don't take themselves seriously and that delight in going way over the top. So why did this leave me so cold?

The film is about as involving as watching your friends play a video game. It's just people shooting other people. Writer/director Michael Davis completely does away with plot and focuses on bullets and one-liners, which would be totally fine if the one-liners were anywhere close to funny. Are they supposed to be? I honestly don't know. Davis can't quite seem to decide on a tone, and I was never sure how to react to anything, so...I simply didn't have a reaction. 

Giamatti is over-the-top, but only slightly. His excellent work as Pig Vomit in Private Parts was far more unhinged, and that was supposed to be a true story. This is the kind of movie where the villain should be biting the heads off of midgets and smearing their blood on his body. He's too reserved here.

Owen barely moves his mouth, and winds up leaving very little impression. He is given exactly two character traits. The first is that he's sort of like Larry David with a gun -- he gets annoyed very easily. This material actually clicks a lot of the time, like when he flips out because a driver is swerving in and out of lanes without using his turn signal (a MAJOR pet peeve of mine, and I've wanted to kill these people too. How hard is it to hit that blinker?).

His other trait is that he enjoys eating carrots.

I'm all for mindless violence, and I was expecting a so-bad-it's-awesome movie going in. I wound up with a bit more bad and a bit less awesome than I wanted. Check out the completely underrated and amazingly awesome Crank for similar material done right.

And another thing --  I don't want to hear Nirvana's "Breed" played over a shootout inolving people getting stabbed with carrots. It's one of my favorite Nirvana songs, my band used to cover it every show. What is it doing here? What is the music of Nirvana doing in video games and action movies and CBS's Cold Case -- which used eight Cobain songs in last Sunday night's episode? Are we going to have to deal with this every time Courtney Love runs out of heroin money? What's next, "Territorial Pissings" in a diaper ad?

DEATH SENTENCE (D+)

Well, I'll give them this -- the title is fitting.

Kevin Bacon's son is killed in a gang ritual. The punk who murdered Bacon's son gets off. Bacon hunts the punk and his crew down for revenge. And really, that's all this should be. No one at any level here is intelligent enough to make this a commentary on the dual nature of man. So you'd think director James Wan would focus on the rah-rah fun that can be had from a kick-ass revenge thriller, giving us something along the lines of Ron Howard's fist-pumping Ransom. Instead, he treats the material with the same overly serious, grim, despairing tone he brought to the dreadful Saw.

Kevin Bacon is typically solid, and John Goodman is great in a (too) small role as a crime lord (it is worth pointing out that Goodman, never a small man, now looks like he ate the John Goodman of Roseanne. It's jarring). Kelly Preston is competent in the thankless role of Bacon's wife, and Aisha Tyler is stunningly terrible as the cop investigating Bacon.

The film springs to life exactly once for a genuinely fantastic tracking shot through a parking garage, but all that showy scene does is make everything surrounding it look lazier. Death Sentence is boring, sloppy, and dumb.

THE INVASION (C+)

Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers story has worked like gangbusters several times on film  -- the best being the quirky and terrific 1978 Donald Sutherland version (check it out and beware the final scene!). It's an ideal science-fiction story, one that easily lends itself to commentary on conformity, various political issues, and the feeling that the girl in your bed is not who she was the night before. It's a very difficult premise to mess up. For some reason, The Invasion tries to do exactly that.

The version of this film delivered by acclaimed foreign filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel tested poorly, and thus the Wachowski Brothers and James McTeigue were brought in to "fix" it. Something tells me "fixing" in this case meant ramping up the car chases and giving one of the most durable sci-fi stories of all time -- a story that has worked so well for over 50 years -- a happy ending to please the lowest common denominator. Not that they, or anyone else, saw this film anyway.

There are no pods this time out. The aliens get new recruits in this version by vomiting on people. I actually thought that was kind of awesome, and most of the zombie stuff was reasonably sweet. There's a scene where a creepo shows up at Kidman's door that was genuinely tense. I wasn't bored. But I left underwhelmed and very confused about the film's politics.

The movie seems to be saying "if everyone was emotionless, there would be no war." So...is this the first Body Snatchers remake in favor of conformity? I walked out feeling like the answer to all of the world's problems is zombieism.

I would like to praise Nicole Kidman's performance, and her brassieres might have some sort of Best Supporting Garment Oscar in their future because Blondie's bazookas wuz looking mad tight!

That is all.

tags: movies  movie reviews  shoot em up  invasion  nicole kidman  daniel craig  clive owen  paul giamatti  death sentence  kevin bacon  john goodman  

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