Shoot 'Em Up (Michael Davis, 2007)
Then this. Yes, I know it's a satire. The pushing of the boundaries of "credibility", "reality", "genre tropes" to previously unseen il/logical conclusions.
Most of all, I'm happy that vlcplayer on a MacBook is so easy to skip ahead in increments of 10 seconds, or 1 minute.
I'm confident I missed very little during the gunplay that was crucial to the plot. I might have missed a few Larry David-esque complaints from Clive Owen, but not too many to get the gist. I'm pretty sure there was no dialogue as scintillatingly delivered as
Hard Boiled's Tequila [Chow Yun Fat] saying to the baby "you saved the day you little piss-pot", but I could be wrong.
I know for a fact that Michael Davis' direction, while solid, had none of the witty flourishes and melodrama of John Woo's gunplay films. But then, Michael Davis, acknowledging Woo, is not about to stop and think as hard as that. He wants to go a lot further. He does go further, technically and metaphysically, but he also loses the central human dramas that make Woo's films so damn fun and funny, to the mechanics and the physics of the film-as-a-film. Which is why I kept pressing the hotkeys on my Mac.
After the first gunfight I knew I would lose nothing by skipping and just getting the bare bones of the fights. There was no drama, there was no excitement, there was no giddy glee and silliness that come with the true masters. Just cool stuff. I'm old. I want more.
As the bodies piled up [and pile up they do] I was impressed by the daring nature of the mass-killing, and I realised there was a subtext going on. Somewhere. But, it was just a little too meta, and way too undercooked when it came to, y'know, human things, interesting things.
Hence the fast-forward buttons.