Shooter is never as discreet, focused, calculated, and on-target as its lead character, a wrongly accused ex-military sniper. Instead, it rolls in, loud and obnoxious as a tank, waving a metaphorical “impeach Bush” flag, and seems ready to run over anyone who would dismiss it as a simple action movie.
Training Day director Antoine Fuqua’s latest imitation of social commentary stars Mark Wahlberg as a disgruntled (possibly over his idiotic name) former special-ops sniper Bobby Lee Swagger. Wahlberg’s patriotic lone ranger, dealt a shitty hand by the feds in the past, has found safety in obscurity, retiring to spend more time on his hobby-keeping tabs on the government lies in the news media.
Suddenly, Swagger is summoned back into action by Danny Glover’s shadowy, hoarse-voiced Colonel Isaac Johnson, ostensibly to foil a presidential assassination plot. The Colonel regurgitates some bookish jargon about collapsed “belief systems”-one is not quite convinced he understands what he’s talking about. It all turns out to be a ploy, of course, to set up Swagger as the new Lee Harvey Oswald. After staging his inevitable, narrow escape, Swagger grabs a ton of guns and sets out on the retribution warpath. This much you already know, or could guess, if you’ve watched the trailer.
Shooter certainly has its share of guilty pleasures, particularly a campy performance from Canadian actor Elias Koteas (Exotica) as a slimy federal agent, and a gut-busting cameo by Levon Helm (The Right Stuff) who plays a brainy conspiracy hermit. It’s also fun-in a MacGyverish way-to watch Wahlberg pick up his rifle, take aim at someone a mile away and then calibrate his shot not only against the wind and distance, but the Earth’s rotation, too.
But, for some reason, Shooter seems afraid to come out as the popcorn action flick it really is. Fuqua apparently hopes that, by inserting watered-down Chomsky catchphrases into the shootout dialogue (reloading a gun just ain’t the same without a one-liner) and referencing film theory, he can give Shooter into some kind of intellectual relevance. Sorry, no.
Film review
Shooter
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Danny Glover
Rating: VV / VVVVV
The film’s first half evokes the paranoid thrillers of the 70s, like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, while the second half recalls John Ford’s westerns. The genre mashup is already familiar from Matt Damon’s Bourne movies, which Shooter desperately aspires to be.
Fuqua’s movie fails because its hero is so righteous, he’s downright cartoonish. Corny bad guys, guffawing at their lost innocence, do no better in their limp attempts to criticize the current state of American politics.
Shooter ultimately suffers from something I’d like to call “the Blood Diamond Syndrome,” where films adopt a fake interest in world issues, largely as a pretence for righteously blowing people’s limbs off.
As such, the film will undoubtedly find fans. Watching this film is about as fun as getting hit in the face with a hollow point (bullet, that is).
