REVIEW: Shooter

Apr - 19 | By: Josh Nelson | no comments.

There’s something perpetually disappointing about the films of Antoine Fuqua – often they begin with what seems like a serious premise; racism and corruption in Training Day, and civil war and U.S. military responsibility in Tears of the Sun. However such pretexts quickly fall by the wayside in preference for prolonged and extraneous violent action sequences. Ultimately, any political subtext that was present in the beginning gets lost in the explosions, gunfire and escalating body count. Unfortunately, Shooter is no exception to this trend.

The film begins in Ethiopia where expert sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) has been assigned to protect a military convey from hostile targets. Inexplicably abandoned, the surviving Swagger retires to his mountainside hut where he spends his days with Sam, a beer-retrieving hound who truly is man’s best friend, while trawling the internet for government cover ups. But even though the 9/11 Commission Report makes his bedside reading, Swagger is no conspiracy nut, and Fuqua quickly points out that he’s still a patriot at heart. Called in to aid the government on a potential assassination attempt on the President’s life, Swagger soon finds himself the prime suspect in the death of a political figure and on the run from the law.

Situating its protagonist in a web of corporate corruption and the cover up of an international genocide, Shooter attempts to provide a decidedly political edge to its action plot – and fails. As soon as the first bullets start flying and the narrative escalates from The Fugitive to something more akin to Rambo: First Blood Part II, any sincere critique of the political process or corporate greed is swept away in a tide of mounting corpses. Mark Wahlberg tries hard in the lead but the hackneyed script, which at time seems little more than a cut ‘n’ paste job of any number of earlier action films, never gives him much to work with.