"Shoot 'Em Up"

"Shoot 'Em Up" is worth watching just to realize how good "The Bourne Ultimatum" really was. Both movies take the action film to the absolute extreme of megajacked coke-fueled shaky-cam velocity - ludicrous extremes of building hopping, window crashing, gun flailing. Both protagonists are great actors wearing one expression for the whole movie - Clive Owen snarls fire, Matt Damon grimaces blankly. Both of them are playing guys who can use anything to kill anyone. Both movies have probably five times as many cuts as "Lawrence of Arabia," though neither is even half as long.

There was alot of controversy when "The Bourne Ultimatum" came out over the perceived excesses of Paul Greengrass's run'n'gun style: David Bordwell flipped his shit, while Roger Ebert (who dug the movie) had a more thoughtful analysis of what appears to be a burgeoning backlash against what Ebert calls the "shaky-queasy" style of filmmaking.

We are now long past the point when a handheld camera denotes realism - the whole style has been co-opted, successfully, in the service of outlandish B-movie plots on "24," not to mention adding a dash of grittiness to "Battlestar Galactica" that instantly makes everything "Star Trek" (and most things "Star Wars") look unbearably archaic. There's a certain glamour to the use of the handheld camera in modern sitcoms; "Arrested Development" and "The Office" are probably the most visual TV comedies in broadcast history, the former with lush and bright Socal colors, the latter wintry New England flannel-grey. Even video games are getting in on the shaky-chic; "Gears of War" developed the system called the "roadie run," where the angle shifts right behind your character and the screen shakes like the cinematography in "Saving Private Ryan."

So handheld can be overrused, or underrused, ignored or embraced. But I've always found it silly, if not insulting, when people take moral stands against too much cutting. Greengrass used basically the same style to far greater narrative effect in "United 93," one of the more remarkable film experiences of the post 9/11 world. Oliver Stone made a point of not politicizing his own 9/11 movie, but Greengrass did something more difficult: he challenged you to wonder how you could ever politicize the events of the day. "United 93" is not about a national tragedy - it's about a very normal day in the lives of very normal people, which suddenly becomes the end of the world as they will ever know it. We don't even know anyone's name, but we feel like we know them intimately.

The "Bourne" movies should just be necessary cash cows for Greengrass - a reflection of the "one for them, one for me" philosophy which led Spielberg to make "War of the Worlds" and "Munich" in the same year - and the sheer level of seriousness, in both style and narrative, seem on the perpetual edge of falling into the depths of ponderousness. The reason that they don't, I think, is because Bourne's story is so simple, and Bourne such a straightforward character, that the story enters into the realm of archetype - not merely Bourne's search for identity, but little plot points like a lost love, or repressed guilt, which come out mainly in "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum," Greengrass's "Bourne" duology. Neither movie spends much time on those emotions - Bourne offers fleeting, elliptical observations about his dead girlfriend, and offers only the most direct monosyllablic sentences regarding his motivations. 'This is where it started. This is where it ends." Played straight, the whole thing would be ludicrous.

Greengrass succeeds precisely because he is a genius of quick cutting, something which, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker (like Michael Davis, director of "Shoot Em Up"), can be awful. Its true, as Bordwell argues, that quick cuts ruin the continuity of acting; there's nothing in "Bourne" that comes close to a single take in "Before Sunset," where much of the pleasure is watching the delicate shades of emotion that move across Ethan Hawke's and Julie Delpy's faces. But the quick-cutting in "Bourne" suggests something even more insidious - that everything is constantly in motion, shifting in jacknife fluidity from banal to explosive. The great set-piece in the "Bourne" trilogy is almost certainly the scene in the London train station, where there isn't very much action, really - a few punches thrown, a single gunshot - but every moment is supercharged with paranoia. Greengrass has a gift for perfect disorder: it is possible to find the subject of each shot, but you have to be quick; fortuntely, Greengrass can focalize everything through his protagonist, so even if the audience has no idea what's happening, they can at least be assured that their man Bourne probably has a plan.

Anyone who doubts that Greengrass has a true gift for the quick cut needs to only watch a few minutes of "Shoot 'Em Up" to understand what truly bad hyperkinetic editing looks like. The cuts always seem to fall at awkward points of dialogue, as if the editor just got bored of a particular shot. The structure is somewhat similar to "Ultimatum" - minimal conversation followed by lengthy action sequences. But Bourne's action scenes follow a classical Hitchcockian suspense line - you're constantly waiting for the bomb to go off, except you don't know where the bomb is, what it looks like, who it's supposed to kill, and if there's even a bomb at all. "Shoot 'Em Up" idea of suspense is to start a scene with one small gun and see just how many bigger guns you can cram into a single set piece. You could say, as many critics have, that the movie is a spoof of itself, that it works because of the sheer momentum of the piece.

Bullshit. You know right from the start that Smith is basically invincible - compare the beginning of "Shoot Em Up," where Smith violates a few dozen laws of physics and kills about ten guys before you even know his name, to the beginning of the "Bourne" series, where Bourne has a couple bullets in his back before you even know his name. The rest of "Shoot Em Up" basically plays off the same episodic storyline - it heightens the visuals (stairs! car crashes! skydiving!) without ever heightening the stakes. I would argue that "Children of Men," another Clive Owen movie where he's trying to protect a special baby, achieves far more momentum with its long takes - it allows you to luxuriate in every moment, of movement, hell, of breathing, while "Shoot Em Up" just keeps whisking you along to the cool stuff.

"Shoot 'Em Up" sucks. That's why I talked about "The Bourne Ultimatum" for the whole review.