First Principles

I award this movie 2 out of 5 Reagans, and it’s lucky to get that.  The attempted political message embedded in the movie is horrifyingly laughable, although I appreciate the rich blog fodder it provides.

This was one of those flicks on our Blockbuster queue for a long time, and finally made it up the list.  I expected a mindlessly entertaining movie that did exactly what the title promised, and was not disappointed.  Although it was funny to see A list actors like Clive Own and Paul Giamatti take on such a goofball B movie like this.  I think both of them were competing for the Best Worst Lines Spoken By a Better-Than-This Actor award, but to their credit, they clearly knew it and just were having fun with it.

The movie itself is nothing remarkable.  Like I said, it does exactly what the title implies – lots of bullets fly, lots of bad guy henchmen get wasted, and the Lone Gunman kills the bad guys and gets the girl in the end – all with extreme prejudice.  It’s actually a lot like watching a video game.  Laws of both physics and man are mercilessly mocked.  But it’s so over the top that it’s funny and I was completely entertained for the whole 86 minutes of mayhem.

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The iconic character in American cinema is the Lone Gunman, the regular guy who beats overwhelming odds, and does it himself, and in his own way.  He is self-reliant, tough, and resourceful.  He is ruggedly individualistic, and guards his independence jealously.  He doesn’t want to be tied down, but can’t help but to assist people when he’s able.  Think Han Solo, The Man with No Name (or any Clint Eastwood character, they’re all the same), or even the hippy movies where some lone crusader is battling a government conspiracy.  Even where the movie attempts to make some “liberal” point, the core of conservatism – the honor we have in our country’s DNA for the individual and for what he can accomplish – resonates through.  A good storyteller understands that if his story and its underlying themes are not honest and true, the movie will flop with audiences.  And conservatism is true.

This movie follows that tradition, almost by accident.  Which is why, frankly, it gets any Reagans at all.  If that’s all it was, it wouldn’t be worth blogging about.  But the contrived motivations and attempted gun control “message” is too richly absurd not to comment upon.

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The plot is roughly this: (Yes, there are spoilers.  If you care, you vastly miss the point of the movie.)  Clive Owen is sitting on a bench minding his own business when he sees a guy with a gun chasing a pregnant woman.  He reluctantly intervenes, even though he doesn’t have a gun himself.  He gets one before long, but in the meantime, he’s able to kill with the carrot he’s eating.  Seriously.  Apparently, carrots can penetrate the thick bones at the base of the skull!  Who knew?

He holds the baddies at bay long enough to help her give birth to the baby, which the bad guys are also trying to kill for some reason he doesn’t yet know.  She doesn’t make it, but he’s able to get the baby away.  To keep the baby safe and well fed, he takes it to a prostitute he knows who has continued lactating (after HER baby died somehow) in order to corner a niche fetish market for dudes into that sort of thing.

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It turns out that Clive Owen used to be a champion shooter, a sharp-shooting prodigy raised by his gun loving father.  His old man, a Brit, moved to the US when the UK’s gun control laws got to be too much, and then set up a gun shop.  Dad was then killed, along with the rest of the family, by a guy who robbed a restaurant USING THE SHOTGUN POPS HIMSELF HAD SOLD THE ROBBER!!!  Dun dun DUN!!!!!

(It’s clearly crap, of course.  A gun shop owner would have had a CCW and killed the robber.  Jus’ sayin’.)

Clive realized how evil this made all guns, and renounced them in favor of carrots.  His profession now apparently consists of hanging out at bus stops and waiting for pregnant damsels in distress to run by.

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Meanwhile, we learn that the mother and baby is one of several pairs the bad guys, led by Paul Giamatti, are trying (mostly successfully) to kill.  It turns out that a Senator, who is poised to win the Presidency of the United States based almost solely on his tough gun control position (another whopper) has leukemia.  Not being able to find a suitable donor for bone marrow, he decides to make his own – impregnating several women to create marrow donor babies to harvest.

The bad guys are controlled by a gun manufacturer who wants to kill the Senator so he can’t be the President and his gun control agenda will never be implemented.  So they decide to go eliminate his marrow farm, which will condemn him to die of the leukemia before the election.  The simple plans always work the best, you see.

But the Senator worked out a deal with the badguys – selling out, you see.  They’d let him live, and he’d leave them alone to sell their nasty product to Americans.  A Faustian bargain if ever there was one!

Now, Our Hero finds out about this, and is outraged!  But what is he outraged about?  No, it’s not the fact that the Senator has a baby farm he’s using to harvest organs.  That’s totally cool.  It’s that he decided not to follow through with gun control in order to save his own skin!!!

That’s right.  Farming babies for organs = OK.  Respecting the Second Amendment = Clive Owen shoots you in the head while telling you he hates hypocrites worse than anything.

Even though, without guns, Clive never would have uncovered the plot, saved the baby, survived himself, made a ton of money as an action movie star, etc.  Well, I guess he has his Killer Carrots.  But he sure did expend a lot of bullets in the Cause of Good for a movie with a gun control theme.  I wonder if he understood how ironic that made his hypocrisy line?  I guess it’s OK, though, because he never carries one of his own.  He’ll only use other people’s against them.

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None of this ruined the movie for me, because a) my expectations were so low going in, b) plot in a movie like this is as relevant as the motivations of the Xerox repairman in a porn flick, and c) the far more compelling – and honest – theme of the lone hero defending himself and others with guile if he can and force if he needs to overwhelms the attempted (and inconsistent) social message to the point of oblivion.