This film may be the most enthusiastic mess released to theaters since the original Saw. It even has close to the same hook: Saw showed jaded moviegoers brand new ways for characters to die onscreen, while Shoot 'em Up has brand new ways to conduct a gunfight. It's actually very easy to see how this got greenlit. The script is light and breezy with just enough story to set up the next crazy gunfight, the action concepts on display range from tried-and-true-with-a-twist to bet-you've-never-seen-THIS-before, and the dialogue is virtually one cheesy one-liner after another. It has popcorn muncher written all over it. And then the movie starts and you realize the director is nigh untested, and his vapid-but-fun script is all of the former and precious little of the latter, which wouldn't be such an issue if there were more than two funny lines in the whole film. A pair of particularly fun action sequences show up, though by the time they roll around you're already checking your watch. On paper, a gunfight between a man with ten broken fingers and another who's lost so much blood he can't even lift his pistol sounds hilarious. In ideal circumstances it could have been Charlie Chaplin with guns, but it just never comes together like you beg it to. The ideas are here, the enthusiasm is here, but the craft isn't.
4 out of 10.
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