GUN SHY

“I was tired of all those macho movie heroes, and I wanted to write something about a guy who has lost his nerve,” says screenwriter-turned-director Eric Blakeney, who’s helmed his own movie for the first time in GUN SHY. At first glance, his premise seems promising: Charlie (Liam Neeson), a top DEA agent on the verge of a nervous breakdown, seeks help from a group therapy session in New York City, where he is prosecuting his final bust. Charlie is full of fear, and he has to spill his guts emotionally in front of six other men in his therapy group while he has to prepare for a potentially lethal showdown.

A tough-as-nails DEA agent having a nervous breakdown should be a funny situation, but here it’s not. It’s just another clever angle on the hackneyed theme of the same-old drug bad guys fighting the same-old drug good guys which keeps cropping up in one Hollywood thriller after another crafted by the drug-war minds of current Hollywood screenwriters. There are maybe a couple of clever plot twists, but nothing really funny here. In fact, Blakeney has to turn to bathroom humor to inject pseudo laughs into this deplorable movie: Charlie has severe diarrhea and can’t hold his bowels.

This gives entree to nurse Judy Tipp (Sandra Bullock), Charlie’s “love interest,” and the movie’s producer. Bullock delays her first appearance in the movie until halfway through the movie, in the hospital waiting room to which Charlie has retreated during one of his bowel encounters. There, she brazenly announces herself as “Judy Tipp: Queen of Enemas,” and proceeds to administer a colonic to the hospital-gown-clad Charlie. Although it temporarily relieves tension to witness Charlie’s face as he squirms under Nurse Judy’s enigmatic enema, in perhaps the first on-camera enema filmed in Hollywood, the next sequence is completely unmotivated. Nurse Judy invites Charlie to her penthouse garden, where he plays with her in the manure on the roof, and, of course, makes love.

Why would Nurse Judy take up with her patient, whom she doesn’t know and who has a mysterious and dangerous occupation which causes this big 6’4” man to reel in fear, and which he refuses to divulge to her? Blakeney’s linking these two characters together in this movie has all the sticking power of eggs on a Teflon pan. Even so, she hangs in there with him even when he inadvertently escorts her to a restaurant, where she meets the thugs he is about to bust in his DEA sting, and then helps in his getaway in the film’s flimsy finale.

Why would a nurse run away with a federal drug cop she just met in a medical procedure? Because she loves mystery? It’s even more mysterious that she finds him attractive enough to jeopardize her career in the hospital all for one crazy fling which puts her own life in danger.

Then there’s Judy’s supposed “life instruction,” which she administers to Charlie on a bridge as she and he walk together after one of his sessions with the mob thug. She teaches him a banal and meaningless story about a Buddhist monk, who is about to die at the hands of his enemies. Judy tells Charlie that, in the face of his certain impending death, the monk calmly picks a rose and smells it. Judy relates this story to Charlie as a metaphor for what he should do in the face of his certain, impending death.

“And that’s it? That’s all there is?” asks Charlie.

“That’s all there is,” says the enigmatic Judy, smiling.

No, that’s not all there is, Judy. There’s Jesus, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus is the Person to Whom you ought to be making analogies as you instruct Charlie in the ways of life. He is life. He doesn’t just smell the roses: He made them in the first place, and He offers new life to all who ask Him.

More mysterious yet is the motivation of the therapy group members who voluntarily risk their lives to aid and abet their newly-encountered comrade, Charlie’s, survival in the hour of his showdown. Why? Unmotivated story sequences. Bad storytelling.

Not to fault the actors’ performances, which were moderate to good. Neeson maintains his harried, vigorous, debonair persona, while Oliver Platt plays a remarkably vicious, capricious and people-pleasing thug, who claims he hates his career. The Columbian cocaine kingpins look ruthless enough. Sandra Bullock looks attractive, but preoccupied as she perplexingly proposes romance with Charlie in this Teflon affair.

Ultimately, GUN SHY leaves the audience sad and depressed. Sad at the bad storytelling which relies on a hackneyed plot, crude humor and many obscenities. Depressed because the world of the GUN SHY hero, and of his Mafia and drug lords targets, is really miserable, rude, lewd, and crude. It is not funny, nor triumphant, but just one more mundane look at the ugly underworld most viewers would rather overlook.

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