Shoot Em Up could not be more appropriately named. The producers probably spent more money on fake blood than Clive Owen. It's certainly one of those films that are a nice palette cleanser where you can leave your brain in the car and just have a good time. Like El Mariachi, SEU tells the story of one bad ass mofo pitted against an army of gangster thugs, this time lead by the fiendishly fun Paul Giamatti.

Though the plot isn't bad, it's execution falters at times, but not to worry, it's truly nothing more than an excuse to get the led flying fast and furious. The film starts as a pensive Clive Owen sits on a bench on a dark, deserted and somewhat dangerous looking street. As expected a beautiful pregnant woman runs past crying hysterically, soon followed by a black sedan that takes the corner too fast and crashes into a parked car at the top of the street. The driver pops out, wagging a large handgun and yelling vituperatively at the woman who turns into a parking garage seeking refuge. After chasing her to the mouth of the garage the gunman stops long enough to ask Owen "what're you looking at?" Famous last words.

Owen utters a beleaguered "bloody hell" and soon enough he's dragged into a mysterious caper that will require him to expend enough bullets to fill a swimming pool. Within the next few minutes Owen is pressed into service as a gun-weilding Gynocologist who must assist in an impromptu birth amid a maelstrom of gunfire. Owen learns soon after the delivery that the mother has been fatally wounded and all the sudden he's got a newborn to protect from an ever growing army of gun toting toughs. With a little good fortune on his side he manages to extricate himself from this scrape, killing off all the evil-doers in a series of acrobatic ballistics while cradling the infant under his left arm.

Giamatti is the wise-cracking head of the legions of bad guys, and much to his consternation he is forced to continually recruit men from other kingpins as Owen systematically dispatches hood after hood in wholesale numbers until Giamatti's ranks are all but decimated time and time again. Leaving a despondent Giamatti to exclaim "do we really suck that bad, or is this guy that good?" By strong-arming a local prostitute (Belucci) Owen learns that he's gotten himself in the midst of a black market baby ring that also involves organ harvesting – maybe who knows? He is able to recruit the help of Belucci and with her help he's able to fall back and regroup long enough to reload his guns anyway.

The fun of the film is the pure pleasure of watching Owen come up with creative ways to extricate himself from seemingly hopeless jams long enough to run headlong into another. The gunplay choreography is great, if not a tad implausible, but the audience was eating this ultraviolent slam bang affair like popcorn and I don't blame them. I enjoyed it myself.

The grand finale (involving jumping from a plane with no parachute) gets awfully far fetched, but again this film is about shooting them up and on that account it succeeds well enough to drag its silly plot and a strangely lifeless performance from Belucci to the finish line where I'll award it a recommend and a B-.