Hangover Review: Gun Shy

After carefully crafting the perfect set of drinking rules, Penguin and Swan embark on reviewing these disastrous films, and sharing the results with the world. Join us!

Penguin

For a moment imagine with me, a movie about a washed up rockstar whose model wife is kidnapped by terrorist while they are on vacation in a foreign land. The rockstar teams up with the government, his attorney and a bounty hunter to get her back. It sounds silly and off the cuff, but also ripe for some huge comedic moments and silly action.

Now let’s turn down our imagination, and ponder the fact that Gun Shy is able to avoid every single sign on the road and creates the most generic and snooze-inducing action-comedy you can think of. The movie never goes beyond with its concept, instead playing the kidnapping and rescue mission as a fairly straight-forward story. There’s few hijinks along the way, but with very little laughs. And the action, what is here, is just laughably forgettable.

To really kick you in the balls though, the movie just doesn’t know how to wrap up. It has something like 5-6 different endings. By the time the movie ends, there are still scenes/plots being wrapped up during the credits. Then there are post-credit sequences and then a sequence after that when the film fades to black. Now if this movie had played it’s cards right and was seen as a satire on the nature of action movies, the multiple endings would be intelligent. Instead it comes off as insufferable and annoying by the end.

Swan

Gun Shy is a movie.

That’s not completely fair. It’s a lot of the parts of a movie put together to make a movie. It makes you think it is going to turn into an action movie at any moment but it never really happens. Not a single explosion. It wants to be a dark comedy but the only times it leans into that territory is the few out of nowhere deaths, which while shocking aren’t enough to really make it a dark comedy. At times it wants to be a drama, few and far between but those moments do exist and are not very engaging.

Even with all of those aspects the movie isn’t good, it isn’t bad. It is kind of a non-entity, at least until the credits where it proceeded to through scene after scene at us in order to pad out the run time (most likely) It even shows alternate death scenes for different characters in the movie. It’s just a lot to take in.

Movie: 2.5

Penguin

Just a bit of background (which we’ve gone over before), we watch a lot of these movies blind so we rely on readily available information to craft our drinking games. In this case, we knew the genre was action-comedy, and we saw the trailers. Which marketed it as a more fish-out-of-water action-comedy starring this washed up musician and his model wife.

We took that information and crafted our drinking game around it. Then we watched the movie and like noted in our review, it does very little with the “action” portion of the action-comedy formula and it does even less with the whole washed-up musician saving his wife angle.

What it does do often is remind you that he was big into sex, drugs and rock and roll so that rule got the most play. The rest of them were whatever. If we had to fix the rules, get rid of the fish out of water and add whenever the government agent is scheming against them.

Swan

We kind of pulled a boner on this one regarding the rules and to be fair it wasn’t our fault. The trailer really lied to us. It made it look like an exciting action comedy with Antonio Banderas as a bumbling, aging ex-rock star. It was non of these things.

I feel like we nailed it with drinking for sex/drug use and surprisingly musical numbers, but the rest of our rules didn’t quite work out. You could probably switch out the explosion rule for deaths just to get a handful of drinks out of it. All and all I would suggest just having a beer and not watching this movie.

Beers Consumed: 2