A pulp detour: Monica Bellucci in Shoot ‘Em Up.
A rare and welcome turn into action comedy — opposite Clive Owen, in a film built almost entirely around its own absurdity.
There is a small but useful sub-folder in Monica Bellucci’s filmography labelled ‘films that demonstrate a sense of humour.’ Shoot ‘Em Up belongs at the top of it.
Michael Davis’s 2007 picture is an unembarrassed action-comedy — deliberately cartoonish, knowingly daft, structured around increasingly improbable shoot-outs. Clive Owen carries the lead. Paul Giamatti plays the villain. Bellucci, as a Roman sex-worker called Donna, occupies the picture’s third corner and provides much of its straightest emotional material.
What the role is
Donna Quintano is, in the film’s pulp logic, a single mother in trouble who becomes the unlikely ally of Owen’s character. The role is not deep on the page; the screenplay treats every character as a vehicle for the film’s next set-piece. What Bellucci does is to play the part as though the film were a more serious one — to give it the weight it does not strictly need — which has the paradoxical effect of making the film itself feel better.
The wider point about her range
Shoot ‘Em Up is the kind of film an actress with Bellucci’s cinematic associations would not typically take. She is by 2007 in the middle of a serious-cinema decade. To accept a part in an unrepentantly silly action film says something useful about her sense of her own career — that she did not, even at the height of her European auteur period, regard genre as beneath her.
It is also, more practically, the kind of film that has helped her image stay durable across continents. American audiences who have not seen Irréversible or The Best Offer have very likely seen this.
Related