‘Shooter’

There are enough twists and turns and hair’s-breadth escapes here to keep things charging along for a little more than two hours.

By: Bob Brown
   This action film is a variant of the classic wrong-man plot, which is so much a part of Hitchcock’s work (The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, for example). It’s a surefire device to get the adrenaline flowing (as in The Fugitive, 1993). In this twist on the genre, directed by Antoine Fuqua, corrupt politicians and vigilante justice up the ante. You might say it’s The Manchurian Candidate meets Unforgiven.
   Fuqua knows his way around action and eliciting great performances. Denzel Washington’s first Best Actor Oscar was under his direction for Training Day (2002). The main character in Shooter is wrong-man Bob Lee Swagger, played by the very appealing, and very buff, Mark Wahlberg. He has parlayed his underwear-modeling background into a promising film career, which lets him show off washboard abs and bulging pecs in curious counterpoint to his baby-faced innocence.
   On the page, Swagger is a formula character without much depth. But he’s made a tidy side-income for his creator, journalist Stephen Hunter (a Pulitzer Prize-winning movie reviewer for The Washington Post). Swagger features in four Hunter novels, the first being Point of Impact, the basis for this movie. Like all disaffected heroes, Swagger (how apt can a name be?) is a loner with a chip on his shoulder and a hyper-developed sense of truth, justice and the American way. When everyone else sees the Stars and Stripes fraying at the edges, Swagger is the kind of guy who continues to wave them.
   When we first see him, Swagger is aborting a secret sniper stakeout in Ethiopia after his spotter is shot. The two are abandoned by their command post, since their operation is undercover. Three years later, Swagger and his faithful dog are recluses, living in a Rocky Mountain cabin. They are tracked down by a paramilitary group needing Swagger’s sniper talents. Col. Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover) explains there is a plot to assassinate the president at a public engagement, the time and place undetermined. They need Swagger’s expertise to determine whether conditions are best in Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia, so they can stake out sniper locations and eliminate the threat before it happens.
   Action movies don’t have to make much sense, and this is no exception. Swagger’s counterintelligence training is counterintuitive when it comes to questioning things. Why should they stake out the site on the day of the possible shooting? Why not nab the sniper before the act, instead of having Swagger tell them the perfect scenario and stand by to call the perfect shot seconds before it happens? Of course, when shots ring out on Independence Square (Philly being determined as the best place for an attempt), Swagger is caught in the crosshairs. The plotters plug him, and as he tumbles out a fourth-story window, crashing through skylights below, it occurs to him that he has been used, not to thwart an assassination, but to plan it.
   From there on, Swagger is a marked man whom the FBI are chasing, with the aid of CNN news flashes. He shows remarkable ability to stay alive in spite of all the manpower and weaponry thrown at him. Downtown Philly has never been so disrupted since the Phillies won the World Series in 1980.
   Who’s behind this plot? Who can you trust? Hard to say. The plot (not to mention the story’s plot itself) is so muddled that no wonder Swagger is forced to disguise himself and try to connect with the few people he thinks he can trust. One is his spotter’s widow, Sarah (Kate Mara), who binds up his bullet wounds. Another is a do-good FBI agent, Nick Memphis (Michael Peña), who has smelled a rat and done some extracurricular investigating on his own. Nick gets tips from a sympathetic federal functionary, Alourdes (Rhona Mitra), and joins Swagger in the field, eventually serving as his spotter and his sniper cover.
   There are enough twists and turns and hair’s-breadth escapes to keep things charging along for a little over two hours. Several pyrotechnical teams were kept busy rigging up explosions and fires to offset the relatively quieter moments when only firearms were popping people off. The action-packed score is by Mark Mancina, another Fuqua collaborator (Training Day). Brilliant action photography is by cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr., who has worked on another film featuring Wahlberg and vigilante justice, Four Brothers.
   At the heart of this movie is a rigid cynicism about government and American motives that simply wouldn’t have occurred even back when Jimmy Stewart cleaned up the U.S. Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). On the eve of World War II, a gee-whiz demeanor and a filibuster were enough to shame senators to do what’s right. As played by Wahlberg, Swagger has the look and the attitude of an All-American boy who believes in the ideals. But with slimy politicians like Sen. Charles F. Meachum (Ned Beatty), and an ineffectual justice system, shame doesn’t wash. The barrel of a gun talks loudest. Wahlberg — a wrong man in a casting sense — is no Clint Eastwood, so the edge is somewhat off the resolution. The real star in this film is the weapons coordinator, Ryan Steacy, who was an armourer for lots of films. Never have long-range sniper rifles had such a prominent role.
Rated R for strong graphic language and some violence.