Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than Mark Wahlberg’s left bicep!
Able to traverse gaping plot holes in a single bound! Welcome to an amazingly awful political thriller direct from the Hollywood assembly line – the new Mark Wahlberg film Shooter, from director Antoine Fuqua (King Arthur).
Culled from the Stephen Hunter novel Point of Impact, Fuqua’s latest appears to be a franchise vehicle for Wahlberg (The Departed) to compete with Matt Damon’s sleeker, smarter Bourne series. No tentative plans have been made for future installments, but with Hunter set to release his fourth book featuring ex-Marine sharpshooter Bob Lee Swagger, the source material remains plentiful.
Swagger is the gun-wielding, impervious “man with no name” (except with a name) for our brain-drained generation. All sunglasses and muscles, the role offers little room for Wahlberg to work his fine acting chops and more of a chance to, well, blow stuff up.
In a conference call with The Diamondback, Wahlberg named Swagger as one of his favorite roles.
“I’d have to say it’s between this character, Dirk Diggler [Boogie Nights] and Sgt. Dignam [The Departed],” Wahlberg says. “They’re all extremely talented and good at what they do.”
Shooter marks the actor’s first outing since his Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards for his role in The Departed. Rather than taking another shot at Oscar glory, Wahlberg says he sought out movies he wanted to star in – and that people would want to see him starring in.
“Well, I certainly just can’t go looking for English period dramas that will get me nominated again,” Wahlberg says.
The character Swagger attracted Wahlberg’s attention as it was, in his opinion, “more of a Travis Bickle or Dirty Harry” type from the 1970s movies he idolizes.
“I don’t think it’s a glorified soldier role,” Wahlberg says. “There’s certainly nothing glamorous about it.”
To prepare for his role, Wahlberg had to prepare physically and mentally, enduring sniper training under the supervision of a real-life Marine sniper so he could handle the stunt work.
“I did everything Antoine [Fuqua] asked me to do,” Wahlberg says, “which was pretty much all of it.”
Wahlberg brings a burly grit to the film, but the right stuff sometimes just isn’t enough.
Jonathan Lemkin’s screenplay (a mess in itself) starts us three years prior to the bulk of the action, when Swagger worked as a sniper for a secret U.S. force interfering with hostile soldiers in Ethiopia. Things get a little too hot for the Americans – they hightail out of the country, leaving Swagger and his partner Donnie (Lane Garrison, Crazy) for dead. Donnie becomes a quick casualty, and the Ethiopians become the first to incur the wrath of Swagger.
All hell breaks loose in the first high-octane fire fights, and after taking out a small army – helicopter included – Swagger magically finds his way home. After 36 months pass, the government (or so we think), approaches the retired, disillusioned and briefly ponytailed gunman in his wilderness home where he lives with his dog and massive gun collection.
Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover hamming it up, Dreamgirls) calls on Swagger to aid his country once again. The president will be assassinated (or so Swagger is told) in Baltimore, Philadelphia or Washington. For all his infinite resourcefulness and training in counter-intelligence, Swagger swallows the pitch.
Rejuvenated by a crew cut and a renewed sense of patriotism, the hero determines Philadelphia must be the spot for the big hit. But something is rotten in Denmark: The shooting goes down, and Swagger is left with two gunshot wounds and the wrap for the death of an Ethiopian archbishop.
Mindless is as mindless does, but unfortunately, the filmmakers were not content with simply supplying an inherently stupid slice of a campy action movie.
Instead, insert complicated and twisted plots involving murderous senators, semi-government contractors and murdered Ethiopian villages; then add a pinch of oil interest, a reference or two to Sept. 11, and don’t forget the war in Iraq. Let all that settle in between explosions and chase scenes, bake for roughly two hours and you’ve got Shooter, a movie stuck between amusingly stupid and frustratingly, arrogantly stupid.
The former: Swagger and his FBI sidekick (Michael Peña, World Trade Center) turn a rural Virginia manor into Vietnam, circa 1970, or, in another more humorous scene, the two men visit an aging gun expert in his Tennessee home, played with zealous old-timer spunk by The Band’s Levon Helm.
But the latter – the frustratingly stupid – occurs far more frequently, as the film struggles in search of significance beyond entertainment. One character tells Swagger toward the end of the film, “It’s not the Wild West where you can clean things up with a gun.”
Nevertheless, Wahlberg is convincing enough: He was born to play the tough guy. He has both his nervous sidekick and a beautiful Southern belle to boot (Kate Mara as Sarah Fenn, We Are Marshall). However, the screenwriter did not load Wahlberg’s script with any of the treasured one-liners he had to work with in The Departed – the dialogue exists only as filler between bomb bursts and skull-splitting head shots.
But talk is cheap, especially in Shooter, so Swagger sticks to his guns from beginning to end. A gore-fest appropriate for lobotomy patients and political conspiracy-theorists alike, Shooter exists in a realm beyond logic and reason, in some alternate, highly flammable universe.
Contact reporter Zachary Herrmann at zhermm@umd.edu.
