Metacritic reviews

Its pulpy violent excess will tip over...into slightly more excessive excess. That's its silly, scuzzball joy.

Anyone looking for subtlety, character development or layered plotting will be disappointed, but action fans will find plenty to amuse them with this film that makes "Hard-Boiled" look restrained.

Extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller.

This wet dream for action junkies leaves out logic and motivation --you know, all the boring stuff.

It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

There's a little bit of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" in Shoot 'Em Up, although this production isn't as smart or as slick.

The whole thing feels like watching somebody else play a video game. Director Michael Davis obviously was more interested in crafting a series of gunfights than a coherent story arc.

Good taste is the first fatality in this gonzo thrill-seeker, sure to offend mainstream dispositions, yet too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?