HOLLYWOOD Q&A

Q: I just saw the Clive Owen movie “Shoot ‘Em Up.” Was it based on anything? It feels like a comic book movie or something.

A: Director and writer Michael Davis did base over-thetop 2007 action flick “Shoot ‘Em Up” on something, but not in the way you think.

The whole inspiration for the plot came from a single scene in a movie, the 1992 Hong Kong action classic “Hard Boiled,” directed by John Woo.

“I saw Chow Yun-Fat with a baby and I go, ‘Wow, what a great image. That’s the movie,’” Davis said in an interview with Coming-Soon.net. “The most hardboiled guy in the world stuck with the most innocent thing in the world, the contrast of the violence and the innocence.”

Davis was true to his word, really upping the baby content in his movie. The baby is in just one sequence of “Hard Boiled” (albeit a crucial one), whereas the baby is what drives the plot of “Shoot ‘Em Up.” In the film, Owen plays a drifter who helps deliver a baby and then protects it from assassins.

You read that right — they’re trying to assassinate the baby. Elements like that are indeed more like comic book logic than realism.

Indeed, Davis said he took inspiration from a few other directors who favor heightened versions of reality to the real thing, folks such as Frenchmen Luc Besson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet — action/fantasy directors who

take American-style storytelling and twist it.

Q: Is Robert Downey Jr. making another Sherlock Holmes movie?

A: I assume you’re asking because you want one, and so you’re in luck. Reports say that a third movie is in the works, with Downey set to return as the legendary sleuth and Jude Law as his almost-as-legendary sidekick, Dr. Watson. The current plan is to release it in late 2021.

The only other thing that we know almost for sure (all these things are subject to change until shooting begins sometime this year) is that Guy Ritchie will no longer be in the director’s chair. He’s been replaced by Dexter Fletcher, who is very much the British film “it boy” today that Ritchie was when he helmed the first Downey-asSherlock film in 2009 (which was, of course, far from the first Sherlock Holmes film).

After that, it’s all just rumors, though there are plenty. Most notably, WeGotThisCovered. com reported a hot tip back in December that Jared Harris would return as Moriarty.

This would, of course, be a further diversion from the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. The end of the last movie, 2011’s “A Game of Shadows,” showed Holmes and Moriarty seeming to die at Reichenbach Falls, only for Holmes to be miraculously resurrected, just as in the stories. But Doyle never brought Moriarty back.