Shooter (Full Screen Edition) (2007)
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Michael Peña Director: Antoine FuquaEditorial Reviews...A movie that would not have been out of place in the run of paranoid-political thrillers of the 1970s, Shooter works an entertaining variation on the assassination picture. Mark Wahlberg, carrying over good mojo from The Departed, slides neatly into the character of Bob Lee Swagger, master marksman. Swagger has retreated from his duty as an off-the-books hired gun for the military, having become disillusioned with his government (switching on his TV at his remote mountain cabin, he mutters, "Let's see what kind of lies they're trying to sell us today."). Ah, but the government needs Swagger to scope out the location of a rumored attempt on the life of the president, so a shadowy government operative (Danny Glover) begs Swagger to use his sniper's skills to out-fox the assassin. From there--well, spoilers are not fair, since the movie has a few legitimate shocks and a very nice wrong-man scenario about to unfold.A novel by the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter gives the movie a logical spine, even if the premise itself is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. Wahlberg gets support from Michael Pena, as a skeptical FBI agent; Kate Mara, as a trustworthy widow; and Ned Beatty, trailing along memories of Network, as a supremely cynical Senator. Along with the well-executed action sequences (the previously unreliable director Antoine Fuqua gets it in gear here), the movie includes a few potshots at the Bush administration. No, that doesn't put Shooter at the level of The Parallax View or All the President's Men, but it provides some tang along with the flying bullets. --Robert Horton. Read more.
Customer Reviews
By J. Hoffman (Bloomington, Minnesota USA)
..."Shooter" is the grotesque adaptation of Stephen Hunter's excellent novel "Point of Impact" to the paranoid delusions of Antoine Fuqua and the producers. Fuqua has taken Hunter's perennial Bob Lee Swager from his traditional values, Vietnam Marine scout/sniper background, and rural Missouri/Arkansas heritage and transposed him into a shallow and unbelievable GWOT veteran betrayed by international butchers and various old fat white men stereotypes. Wahlberg is entirely unbelievable as a principled Marine Scout/Sniper veteran and the other characters suffer from miscasting and horrible development in the screenplay. Fuqua's GWOT misrepresentation as an unequal conflict between "haves" and "have nots" is nothing more or less than Michael Moore redux. Technically, a movie centered around precision long range shooting should provide a treasure trove of interesting detail, as Hunter does in "Point of Impact". Fuqua, however, concentrates on demonstrating firearm and ballistic ignorance, favoring big guns and ludicrous details and tactics. Continuity is on vacation here, with close ups of muzzles of one rifle flashing to entirely different rifles being actually fired. The real tragedy here is that in Hunter's "Point of Impact" Fuqua had a clear and detailed blueprint for an excellent movie. Instead Fuqua and his producers made a hollow travesty of the original story. The most that can be said is that "Shooter" serves as a complete and detailed bad example.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes [Blu-ray] (1973)
