This saves me from walking out of it.
LIBERTAS Review: Shooter
Shooter, Antoine Fuqua's (Training Day), new actioner about a former military sniper (Mark Wahlberg) embroiled in a vast government conspiracy opened wide yesterday and evenly divided critics with a 49% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Had the film not put pictures of Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, and George Bush Sr. prominently on the wall of the bad guy's office — had the film not mentioned WMD "lies," — had the film not been all about an oil conspiracy — had the film not called Abu Ghraib a cover up – had the film not bad mouthed Donald Rumsfeld — it wouldn't have gotten any good reviews. Because it sucks.
And did I mention an FBI agent wears a Che shirt?
Shooter is a perfect example of a movie destroyed by a filmmaker more interested in airing his liberal views than telling a decent story. Fuqua has something to say, and he'll be damned if he's gonna allow little things like cohesion, originality, decent dialogue, and character get in the way. I'm perfectly okay with plot holes designed to move plot — especially in an action film. But these plot holes aren't designed to get us to the next action scene, they're designed to get us to the next liberal speech. They're designed to create a big business oil conspiracy that allows the bad guys to make lame speeches about the "haves and have nots," and the good guys to make lame speeches about how none of this would've happened in a World Court.
We're also supposed to believe this entire conspiracy was created to assassinate a foreign representative before he could give a speech accusing America of committing atrocities for oil. Well, because I live in a world where every time I turn on the news there's a foreign representative accusing us of committing atrocities for oil, that just didn't strike me as all that conspiracy-worthy.
The first act of Shooter's actually pretty good. Bob Lee Swagger (Wahlberg) is a retired military sniper living in seclusion enjoying a country life hanging with his dog and researching 9/11 conspiracies when FBI agent Danny Glover (suffering either a denture or acting problem), talks him into helping them find a Presidential assassin. Naturally, things go very wrong, very quickly, and Swagger finds himself wounded, hunted, and on the run. And the movie finds itself going retarded.
The person charged with killing Swagger is just a few feet away, but only manages to hit him in those special places that allow an actor to limp and grimace for a dull half hour in that actory way they love. And I found it fascinating that the same government who taught Swagger to make bombs and IV drips from stuff found in any 7-11, didn't teach him to drive calmly when not being chased so as not to call attention to himself.
Anyway, this lead-footed MacGyver manages to make it to the only person who can possibly help him, and she just happens to be a hot lonely chick in a halter top with nursing experience. As Swagger recovers and suffers flashbacks (Sorry, I forgot to mention that the movie can indeed get worse as proven by its use of flashbacks), Fuqua hands the narrative over to the unbelievably charisma-free Michal Pena as a mild-mannered rookie FBI agent suffering from a raging case of contrivance. Not only is he the only agent Swagger confessed his innocence too, he just happens to be the one who gets the call from a woman who spotted Swagger, and then this three-weeks-out-of-the-academy-agent is the only one who puts together that the media received information about Swagger twenty minutes before he was accused of anything.
After this, I'm not too sure what happened. Hoping to break the film's tedium, Fuqua tried adding confusion. I know Ned Beatty showed up, which was kind of cool. Hadn't seen him in a while. And then someone bad-mouthed America. And then there was some gunfire, and another flashback, and something about how Oswald did in fact not work alone. Inter-cut into all of this were these strange shots of Elias Koteas acting all sinister around Halter-Top Girl — which of course made me think of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and how cool he was as Casey Jones — and how badly I'm gonna hammer the new one Monday if he's not in it.
****SPOILER****BUT*******DO*****YOU*******REALLY*********CARE?*******
The film's final 15 minutes are indescribably bad. Everyone's captured but then let go because there's no laws in America to prosecute them. If only we had a World Court… Somehow, the FBI agent with a mass-murderer on his shirt gets reinstated, and somehow all the bad guys who did Swagger wrong get together in a secluded cabin to smoke cigars, drink brandy, and talk all Magna Carta unconcerned by the fact he's loose.
Fuqua's ham-handed approach and contempt for the audience can be summed up in the film's final shot: After killing a lot of important people, Swagger escapes by car. As he coasts along a long flat road headed for the mountains and a new life (cliche anyone?), he drives right down the middle of the road straddling the yellow line. Every cop in the country has to be looking for him, but to make the shot look better Fuqua has his fugitive haflway into the wrong lane begging for a DWI stop.
This is a terrible film. Awful film. Even Mark Wahlberg couldn't elevate it as he's done for movies like The Big Hit (a terrific underrated gem) or Four Brothers. But I don't blame Fuqua for this debacle, I blame Denzel Washington, whose dynamic performance in Training Day made a pedestrian script special, and convinced people Fuqua had something to do with it. Fuqua's post non-Denzel films have stunk. And now we know politics are as empty-headed as his storytelling abilities.
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