When Shoot ‘Em Up begins, we’re confronted with the face of Smith (Clive Owen). We take in his intense, maybe even lunatic eyes. The five o’clock shadow. The wild hair. And just as we begin to appreciate the finer details of this dangerous man gone to seed, he lifts a big carrot up and takes a bite off the tip. By the time the end credits roll, at least four people will die with the assistance of carrots; this is three more carrot-related fatalities than I have seen in the past ten years of movies combined. The first was in Jack Frost, a movie about a serial killer who comes back to life as a snowman. Just let that soak in for a while: In the Venn diagram of film history, Shoot ‘Em Up overlaps with Jack Frost.

That’s not exactly the knock you might think it is. Once you get past the first carrot-related murder – one shoved right through the eye, clear out the back of the skull – it doesn’t take along to figure out what kind of movie Shoot ‘Em Up is. It’s not really an action flick, and certainly not one worthy of clichéd blurbs like “high-octane thrill ride” (thanks, Pete Hammond!). It’s not dark, because only the prudest prude to prude his way out of Prude Town could take anything onscreen seriously enough to be offended. The carrot is the clue: Shoot ‘Em Up is pure “Looney Tunes,” and every action sequence is more like an extended physical comedy sketch than anything you’ll find in a John Woo movie.

Briefly, the setup: Smith is minding his own business at a bus stop when a pregnant woman lurches by him, deep in the throes of labor. In hot pursuit are several gunmen. Smith, pushed into action more by annoyance than good manners, defends the woman long enough to deliver her baby. This baby (we’ll call him Baby MacGuffin) is wanted very badly by a bunch of hoodlums and their master Hertz (Paul Giamatti, who comes off more like an unhinged accountant than a scary hitman). Smith and Baby MacGuffin soon hook up with Donna Quintano (Monica Bellucci), the world’s most beautiful hooker. Hilarity ensues.

If I sound flippant, let me assure you that Shoot ‘Em Up is more flippant than I. There are only the flimsiest gestures toward plot coherence or forward motion, and no one is more aware of this than writer-director Michael Davis. Take, for instance, the scene where Smith takes Donna and Baby Mac to his elaborate death trap of a home, situated in (where else?) an abandoned warehouse under a massive highway overpass. Next scene: Hertz and his thugs approach the same door. How did Hertz find them? It doesn’t really matter; someone tosses off a line about how Hertz used to be an ace FBI profiler or something, and therefore we have all the reason we need to explain how Hertz keeps finding two people in a city that seems to be fifty square miles of slums.

Relying almost entirely on genre clichés and intense suspension of disbelief is a bit of a gamble, but Davis makes it work because he knows why anyone would come to see a movie like this at all. That the gunfights are improbable is a given. Likewise given are the horrid one-liners that are somehow made funny by the fact that it’s Clive Owen or Paul Giamatti up there delivering them. There are, by god, henchmen, an endless stream of thugs wearing black clothes, knit caps, and sunglasses for no particular reason. Scratch that: The reason is it looks cool. “It looks cool” may as well have been the design philosophy of whatever god crafted this world. I guess I’m talking about Davis there.

In fact, Shoot ‘Em Up is pure product so slick that it threatens to slip into Teflon territory at any moment. Nothing sticks, nothing retains, and even now I’m having a hard time remembering exactly what the deal was with Baby Mac, not that that really matters much. In fact, Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci are the only reason to care enough about anything that happens onscreen. Without them, Shoot ‘Em Up would be just another $5.99 DVD at Wal-Mart. Did I laugh? Yeah. I enjoyed myself, sure. Am I glad I saw it for free? You bet.