Shooter: Review

Let's get it on the table first off: Shooter was hands down, the worst film I've seen this year, a horrid attempt at both action and satire that ends up falling on its face more often than not. Despite an interesting cast and a director who has shown flashes of brilliance in the past, Shooter has almost nothing going for it, largely due to an awful script loaded with terrible dialogue and plot holes. The fact that this film was mildly well received and currently holds a rating of 7.2 on IMDB.com is not only absurd, it should be insulting to any self-respecting film fan with a half a brain.

Antoine Fuqua, the director behind this mess, imbues the film with very little unique style rather working strictly in the clichés of the action genre and coming out with a film that is, well, painfully generic. Even the look of the film, typically the most important part of big budget actioners, feels dull and drab and save for a few admittedly spectacular views of scenery, there is almost nothing that discerns this from the next Model T action flick. Fuqua, who made the enjoyable Training Day, does not strike me as an untalented director when working out of the confines of studio control. Despite its predictability at times, Training Day strayed far enough from the norm to make for an experience that felt like a unique take on the good cop/bad cop scenario. Shooter, however possesses nothing other than cliché after cliché, and by film's end, I was left exhausted and drained at the sheer idiocy of the whole thing.

The cast as a whole is terrible, anchored by laughable performances by Mark Wahlberg and Danny Glover. Wahlberg, who plays a retired Marine scout sniper who is brought out of retirement to help prevent a presidential assassination, seems to be confused as to what film he is in, unable to decide whether he is playing Bob Lee Swagger (his actual name, I'm not joking) or Brock Landers. Wahlberg, who was riding high on his wonderful performance in The Departed is just miserable here, delivering the clunky lines in a way that it can't even be construed as camp. Unfortunately for Mr. Swagger, the real plot is to frame him and for the rest of the film, Wahlberg is on the run from the Feds, trying to figure out why he was set up. Through a convoluted plot twists, it becomes known that it has to do with an African village, the United States' continued meddling in other countries and a prominent American senator. By films end, I was as confused as you are however, I wasn't necessarily confused as to what happened, but why exactly it needed to happen. The film spends so much time on useless, unintelligible pseudo-politicizing that it too often forgets the interesting action.

Glover is a complete mess, which is another disappointment, given his considerable talents and intelligence when choosing films that regardless of genre, have a moments of entertainment. Now, I'm not entirely sure if anything has happened to Mr. Glover (I searched around to no avail) but throughout the film, he speaks with a strange lisp that makes him sound like a gruffer, throatier Mike Tyson. As first, it was a humorous sideshow that distracted me from the story. Then it just became old and tired and to this point, I cannot figure out why Glover would have decided to include that character trait. The rest of cast is up to Wahlberg's and Glover's standards. Kate Mara, who many will recognize as Heath Ledger's oldest daughter in Brokeback Mountain, and Michael Pena, who may be the most unconvincing FBI agent in cinematic history, pull the film down further. It isn't until a brief scene in which Levon Helm, of The Band, provides a much-needed kick of life and humor that the film has any sort of acting leg to stand on.

Jonathan Lemkin's script is one of the worst in recent memory. The dialogue is clunky and idiotic and the plot itself is fairly dull and lacking suspense. By the film's end, I was too busy laughing at the futility on screen to care at all about any of the characters. Lemkin, who seems to have forgotten to do the research part of screenwriting, peppers the story with moments that will have the audience grimacing. For example, did you know that ultra Black Op Military Forces use Google Maps to locate where a phone trace comes from? I sure didn't but if that’s true, it is all the more clear as to how the Federal Government so butchered the WMD situation in Iraq: they were using the satellite views on Google to determine their next course of action. The dialogue is a veritable pick and choose of lines from How to Write an Action Script 101, devoid of life, humor or thematic exploration.

The sheer atrociousness of Shooter struck me as disappointing. I would consider myself a fan of Wahlberg, who I think, having burst onto the scene with his wonderful Boogie Nights performance, has steadily improved and had a wonderful performance in The Departed. That being said, his and everyone else's performances were crippled by a bad script, most had no chance and upon the start of the film, were DOA. The fact that I've gotten this far in the review with barely mentioning the action sequences is never a good sign but those are middling at best, relying on over the top gunplay and explosions instead of actual cinematic skill and intensity. Unlike, say, The Bourne Ultimatum, which brilliantly utilized the cinematic form to tell its story, Shooter never hits it stride. As a result, it is, without a second thought, the worst film I've seen thus far in 2007 and should be considered an avoid, at all costs.

*