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Home > Blogs > Sir Critic on Cinema > Archives > 2007 > March > 23 > Entry
Wahlberg makes ‘Shooter’ a higher caliber movie
If you scan across reviews of Shooter today, you’ll read all sorts of lines about whether the movie hits the target, misfires, scores a bullseye and all sorts of other pistol-packin’ puns.
I liked Shooter, but not enough to say that it hits the bullseye, or even that it hits its target all that squarely. I’d say the movie’s more like one of those nifty sharpshooters who twirls his gun around in a real fancy way after he fires. It’s not a great act, but it has a few neat tricks to play.
It helps greatly that the main draw (I can’t help myself) is Mark Wahlberg. Between this movie, Four Brothers and The Italian Job, the actor is carving out a nice little niche as an action hero.
Wahlberg plays Bob Lee Swagger, a marksman who can shoot the fleas off a dog’s back at 200 yards. After his partner is killed in a military operation, Swagger takes to playing Grizzly Adams in the woods, until a bunch of men in suits offer him the proverbial One Last Job.
That Last Job is to help the feds catch a would-be presidential assassin. However, the men in suits turn the tables on Swagger and frame him for the shooting. Swagger flees with bullet wounds in him, vowing to find out who set him up and why.
I didn’t hold out much hope for Shooter because the director is Antoine Fuqua, who has a very uneven track record that includes nondescript films like The Replacement Killers and Bait or interesting near-misses like Tears of the Sun and King Arthur. Even his greatest success,Training Day, owes more to its performances than to Fuqua’s camera.
This time, Fuqua paces his movie well, moving the action along briskly and confidently if rather predictably. It’s never too hard to guess which way Shooter is aiming story-wise, yet the main reason the movie works is the cast, which provides refreshing little twists and turns.
While Walhberg is a pretty buff guy, I like how his determination and his smarts rather than his muscles carry the day, and how his emotion is palpable but never overbearing or silly. Michael Pena is fun to watch playing an FBI agent disgraced by Wahlberg who eventually makes Pena an ally. Between his sold turns in Crash and World Trade Center, Pena is becoming an actor I’m always glad to see. The lovely Kate Mara (who played one of Heath Ledger’s daughters as a teen in Brokeback Mountain) lightens the film playing the widow of Wahlberg’s late partner who is simultaneously attracted to and scared of Wahlberg.
These actors hold Shooter together, even when the movie goes over the top with about two or three endings too many. It may be a cross between The Parallax View, In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive, but at least it steals from good sources.
GRADE: B-
PS There’s been a lot of back-and forth-lately in the media about whether critics really matter, given the success of such “critic-proof” movies as Wild Hogs and Norbit. Shooter poses an interesting question. Does it succeed because it blows stuff up real good, or because it’s based on the novel Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter, the Pultizer Prize-winning film critic for The Washington Post? Just wondering. :)
