Ten bucks down the drain

Rico says that, lured by the trailers, he went to see The International yesterday. There he learned two lessons:

One, do not hand your iPhone to a known spazz; he will drop it on the concrete floor and break it.
Two, do not believe the trailers; they're a separate art form.

Okay, movie review time. The International purports to be a fast-paced thriller based on current events, with a grand shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York (actually a reconstructed version on a film stage). It stars people you've actually heard of (Clive Owen, who did The Bourne Identity and Sin City before, and Armin Müller-Stahl, who did The Peacemaker and Leningrad before, though he's looking old now) and Salman Rushdie (in a sleeper role) and Vincent Pastore (of The Sopranos), and certainly keeps things moving, in the currently popular frenetic Hollywood style. Let's ignore all the holes and inconsistencies in the plot, and just focus on the easy stuff:

Why do directors think having people shoot machine-pistols endlessly looks so cool? Aren't they aware (or don't care, more likely) that full auto fire will empty the magazine in a few seconds, and that dragging a dufflebag full of extra clips down the sidewalk is going to attract attention, even in New York?
Why do directors (or their writers) have someone get shot in the guts, survive because they're wearing a bulletproof vest, and then strip off the vest in time to get shot in the guts again?
Why do people get gutshot multiple times, and still take long enough to die to have a conversation?

Rico says it's 118 minutes of ho-hum; that would be 60 minutes of ho and 58 minutes of hum... (Worse yet, we got there early, waiting until the showtime of 7.30, whereupon they ran a half hour of previews, mostly for television shows, and the damned movie didn't start until eight...)
Rico says one star (because you have to reserve no stars for something really bad...)