3. Shoot 'Em Up
I love Shoot 'Em Up. There, I said it. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I've always had a soft spot for films which left sanity at the door and spent the rest of its run-time whistling Dixie and letting all sorts of insanity happen. To it's credit, Shoot 'Em Up does this with the sort of enthusiasm reserved for the circus everything is ramped up to 11, and it's all the more glorious for it. After all, this is the film which let you see Clive Owen's Smith perform the equivalent of bullet ballet, cutting his way through hordes of hired goons before murdering a crack squad of murderers while having sex with Monica Bellucci. If that's not worth you high-fiving the cinema screen, I don't know what is. But still, all films come with a message, and Shoot 'Em Up's was particularly heavy-handed. Effectively, it was arguing how nefarious the gun manufacturers were for attempting to turn America into murderers for a profit. Paul Giamatti's hit-man was hired by the arms lobby to tie up the loose ends of their preferred Presidential candidate, who will back the repealing of second amendment legislation. It's driving a (not subtle) message that guns are bad, and that those who want to keep violence available to all will resort to cartoonish measures to keep such an avenue available. You're meant to go boo and hiss, but there's one thing stopping you Smith himself. Namely, Smith makes guns look awesome to the extent that you're actually enraptured by the possibilities of what one man could do with them. For a film which has this strange anti-violence agenda, it chose a spectacularly inappropriate protagonist the fact of the matter is that throughout this film, guns looks so awesome that you'd consider it a crying shame to ban them. The awkward fact is that this is the view of the film's villains too, making for a strange paradox.