Shoot 'Em Up: Critic Reviews

Smith, in other words, does exactly what you'd expect the hero of a bloody, trashy, volcanically depraved action movie to do. He just does it a little bit...more so, and that's the rollicking good joke of Shoot 'Em Up

Shoot 'Em Up is a witless, soulless, heartless movie that mistakes noise for bravura and tastelessness for wit.

There are laughs in Owen's loathing of various male affectations but it's ultimately wearyingly crude and calculating.

For mainstream audiences, its whiplash pacing, frenetic camera work and offhand manner toward blood spillage probably will be disturbing.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning.

It's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.

This is likely the fastest-moving intentionally funny action movie ever made.

Like Quentin Tarantino without the aesthetic posturing, the film is giddy with pop references -- and embraces the sloshy fun of exploitation genre-tweaking...

The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, Sin City, which in comparison was a chamber drama.

Shoot 'em Up will become, I suspect, some kind of legend in the murky depths of extreme action.

Really, this thing is pretty rank.

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.

For sheer audacity and adrenaline-fueled carnage, Shoot 'Em Up hits its target pretty much dead on.

Deliriously tasteless and shamelessly entertaining, Shoot 'Em Up is the guiltiest pleasure of the year.

Bang. Bang. Bang-bang blood, blood, blood. There, you've seen the movie.

With its absurd anti-gun "message," the film certainly could be called a satire, yet it remains firmly within the genre it is satirizing.

Good taste is the first fatality in this gonzo thrill-seeker, sure to offend mainstream dispositions, yet too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.

You know Quentin Tarantino is probably over the hill when he can be so parodied with such deadly precision in Shoot 'Em Up.

The most amoral action film since Crank.

If John Woo had directed a Bugs Bunny cartoon written by the creators of South Park, the result might be something like Shoot `Em Up, but with a crucial difference: Bugs Bunny cartoons were always less than 10 minutes long.

...an affectionate, often very funny Simpsons parody of its whole eponymous genre. It's a live-action McBane as co-directed by Quentin Tarantino and Chuck Jones.... Shoot 'Em Up is Hot Fuzz gone to the Dark Side.

There is no wisdom or critical acumen in evidence in Shoot 'Em Up, however. Just 100 or so cool scenes masquerading as a movie.

The sum of the movie's exploding parts adds up to nothing -- not even just good, sick fun.

I get it that as soon as graphic novels or video games are invoked as references in a movie, we're all supposed to chuckle indulgently at the content. But I refuse to relinquish my right to be repelled by this nasty piece of work.

Drinking the full adrenaline-with-a-wink cocktail might be too much, but there's nothing wrong with sampling it.