The film “Shoot ‘Em Up,” as the title promises, is filled with guns, blood, overused sexual innuendos and something needed in all action flicks: a sex scene, and a bad one at that.

Eat your carrots, baby killing is wrong and prostitutes make great surrogate mothers. Such are the ideals of Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), an excellent marksman turned vagrant with a past that haunts him, allowing him to wallow in pity and in dirt.

His morals, however, do allow him to interfere with an angry ex-boyfriend on a rampage and aid a pregnant woman about to give birth. The plot is far more convoluted than that, so much so that when the credits started to roll, I was still sitting in my seat waiting for a proper explanation that the 80-minute film did not deliver.

The acting for these thespians is as good as ever and Paul Giamatti, who plays Mr. Hertz, makes a convincing villain with marriage problems, delivering his role beautifully by making his role the most artistic value of the film. Some fresh faces made me cringe when they stumbled through the dialogue, but they can only take so much of the blame when they have to repeatedly say variations of “shoot your load” throughout the movie.

The movie had no plot-only bullet holes. The only thing that can be deciphered from the movie is a dying senator who is running for president impregnates volunteer women to give birth to a hatchery of infants to use for his bone marrow transplant. Mr. Hertz either works for the senator, who supports better gun control, or a multimillionaire gun company owner. I’m still confused.

The main point of the story is that someone is trying to kill one of the hatchery babies and Mr. Smith, along with a prostitute (Monica Bellucci), seems to be the only two trying to save the child.

Mr. Smith’s current state is never fully explained and neither is his endless supply of carrots, but he is a sad man who lost his family in a stick-up, so maybe he took to defending himself in a more healthful way-hence the carrots.
It’s not a good movie, but it lives up to its name. “Shoot ‘Em Up” is a movie with guns, blood and bullets that brush past politics and morals close enough to only slightly address gun control somewhat seriously.

It’s a film like that reminds us that Hollywood is there to make a dollar or two and that some films don’t need to have artistic value to be made. Some films are just for pure entertainment.
So the best thing to do is to chuckle at the dialogue, the raunchy jokes, the implausible plot and the cartoon-like special effects because we are here to be entertained.