GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

DVD and Video

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Recent Releases in DVD and Video

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.



 

Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Shoot 'Em Up
New Line Cinema

Shoot 'Em Up reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 49 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
6.6 out of 10
based on 29 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 54 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive strong bloody violence, sexuality and some language

Starring Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci, Paul Giamatti, Greg Bryk, Stephen McHattie, Ramona Pringle, and Jane McLean

Mr. Smith is a mysterious loner who teams up with an unlikely ally to protect a newborn baby from a determined criminal who hunts them throughout the bowels of the city. (New Line Cinema)


GENRE(S): Action  |  Adventure  |  Comedy  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: Michael Davis  
DIRECTED BY: Michael Davis  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: January 1, 2008 
Theatrical: September 7, 2007 
RUNNING TIME: 80 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

88
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.
Read Full Review
88
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
This is likely the fastest-moving intentionally funny action movie ever made. It's as if the 21 Bond movies and four "Die Hards" had been distilled to remove their body fat (that is, character development, buildup, rest stops, etc.) and left us with only the killing and the punch lines.
Read Full Review
83
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Its pulpy violent excess will tip over...into slightly more excessive excess. That's its silly, scuzzball joy.
Read Full Review
80
The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
Anyone looking for subtlety, character development or layered plotting will be disappointed, but action fans will find plenty to amuse them with this film that makes "Hard-Boiled" look restrained.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice Chuck Wilson
Extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller.
Read Full Review
75
New York Post Lou Lumenick
The season's first guilty pleasure, Shoot 'Em Up is a joyously silly, R-rated, John Woo-in flected Looney Tune, with Clive Owen as a carrot-chomping, gun-toting Bugs Bunny matching wits with Elmer Fudd-ish assassin Paul Giamatti.
Read Full Review
75
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It's funny without being toothless, adrenaline turbocharged without being mean and utterly deranged in the best sense of the word.
Read Full Review
75
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
This wet dream for action junkies leaves out logic and motivation --you know, all the boring stuff.
Read Full Review
75
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
For sheer audacity and adrenaline-fueled carnage, Shoot 'Em Up hits its target pretty much dead on.
Read Full Review
70
Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
The presence of the two actors and the film's mordant sense of humor buoy the downtime between bloodbaths and genre fans may find enough to love here.
Read Full Review
67
The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.
Read Full Review
63
ReelViews James Berardinelli
There's a little bit of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" in Shoot 'Em Up, although this production isn't as smart or as slick.
Read Full Review
63
Boston Globe Ty Burr
Absolutely not for feminists, lovers of period films, and anyone whose sensibilities are bruised by over-the-top stuntwork, it's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.
Read Full Review
60
Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Intermittently amusing.
Read Full Review
58
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The saving grace in an exuberantly graceless movie is Clive Owen. This actor is bulletproof. Even in a sick-joke jamboree like Shoot 'Em Up, he mows down the competition and gets his laughs without losing his composure.
Read Full Review
50
Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Despite all the flying bullets, which are admittedly entertaining at times, Shoot 'Em Up doesn't offer enough bang for your bucks.
Read Full Review
50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer
The whole thing feels like watching somebody else play a video game. Director Michael Davis obviously was more interested in crafting a series of gunfights than a coherent story arc.
Read Full Review
50
USA Today Claudia Puig
Violent thrills and massive blood spills are the essence of the absurdly over-the-top action flick that is Shoot 'Em Up.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics--I was--but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.
Read Full Review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
A furious 90-minute trailer of a movie that exceeds the speed limit for action films established by Quentin Tarantino's recent "Grindhouse."
Read Full Review
50
Premiere Karl Rozemeyer
As a bonus, it contains, at least, the best death-by-carrot scene in the history of film.
Read Full Review
40
Variety Peter Debruge
Good taste is the first fatality in this gonzo thrill-seeker, sure to offend mainstream dispositions, yet too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.
Read Full Review
30
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.
Read Full Review
25
San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Shoot 'Em Up is not only the title of Hollywood's latest descent into nonsensical mayhem but pretty much sums up the entire inane plot as well.
Read Full Review
25
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.
Read Full Review
20
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?
Read Full Review
20
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.
Read Full Review
0
Slate Dana Stevens
Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci--all fine actors at the peak of hireability--must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud.
Read Full Review
0
The New York Times A.O. Scott
A worthless piece of garbage.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 54 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Benjamin K. gave it an8:
You can't really go wrong with a movie that has a sex scene involving a gunfight and an infant.

Scott Q gave it a2:
I am all for action, blood and violence, don't get me wrong, but this is really a horrible movie, seriously, this is really bad.

Tau S. gave it a9:
The rating of this movie is truly insanity! Just because some whining nannys at the New York Times gets a turn on by watching "Sex and the City" doesn't give them the right to crush a perfectly balanced action movie. Any movie starting with a screaming woman, a villain and a random street bums who just happens to be a former ELITE soldier saying: "Oh, fuck it!" and just so happens to interfere in the largest manhunt in the history of men. At the bottom line: if you like action (and yeah baby, i mean real action!) this movie will give you truly satisfaction. And yeah it's right, your girlfriend might not understand why the hell you think this movie is any good - but that fact alone just better the action-packed blasting sequences you are about to watch!

David G. gave it a0:
It's hard to describe just how bad this movie is. Because if I say that it was bad, you might think that it's so bad that it's good. You might think that it was a parody of the genre by being so bad. That's what I thought and why I ended up renting it. However, this movie isn't a parody and isn't even close to being self-aware on that level. But, even if it were, it wouldn't be a clever parody. The action scenes are mechanical. There's no suspense in the scenes themselves. It's a matter of fact, foregone conclusion that every scene will play out perfectly for Clive Owen. I was hoping this would lend itself to an aspect of parody but sadly, it didn't. The entire movie seems to have been formulated around the scene out of Hard Boiled where Chow Yun Fat is involved in a shootout with a baby. That's it. Don't expect more. Do yourself a favor and rent Hard Boiled instead. The most unfortunate part of this movie is that I kept watching it hoping that it would become bad enough to be good.

Chris F. gave it a10:
People take this movie too seriously. It's not meant to be an A movie. This movie was made with the intent of being a B class movie. Like how Grindhouse was intentionally made to be like an old B movie in an exploitation theater. Yeah, the one liners are campy and certain parts are just ridiculous but frankly that's what makes the movie so great.

Telimaktar gave it a2:
Watched it and had to warn anyone interested in hiring this. A load of shite. Totally pointless rubbish. It is really one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Adam H gave it a10:
I loved this movie. If Die Hard or a Bond movie is magic, then this is a Bond movie directed by Penn & Teller. It's not serious and there in lies the beauty.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: MLB | Spore | iPhone 3G | Paris Hilton | Antivirus Software | GPS | Recipes | Shwayze | NFL

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use