SHOOTER (2007)

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"A well-crafted, adrenaline-fueled thriller that tries just a bit too hard to become something it's not."

Bang, Bang, Boom. These are the sounds of Antoine Fuqua's new thriller Shooter starring Mark Wahlberg (The Departed) and Michael Pe&#241a (World Trade Center). From start to finish, your ears will ring with the clatter of automatic weapons and the semi-sonic booms of Mr. Wahlberg's trusty .50 caliber sniper rifle. Shooter is an American thriller in its truest form. Packed with shootouts, one-liners, and dudes with dark hearts and darker sunglasses.

Wahlberg's portrayal of the betrayed Army Sergeant Bob Swagger is nothing to shoot into the sky over. He does the character well, but offers little more in terms of emotional connection. We understand his motives, but not his reasoning. Some say that this might be intentional...that in revenge movies you're not supposed to identify with the character or see a chink in his armor. But to them I'd point out Denzel Washington's touching performance in Tony Scott's Man on Fire. It is in many ways a similar story to Shooter. The characters certainly are similar, but unlike Wahlberg, Washington was able to create a character who the audience could not only rally behind in his quest for revenge, but empathize with as well. This is the key ingredient missing in Shooter... the emotional bond between audience and hero.

With that being said, there are some very well done sequences in this movie, as well as some very interesting characters. There is very little humor, which is strange because Wahlberg created a very cynical hero with few moments of cynical wit. The most impressive sequence in the movie is a very large scale firefight that takes place in a small farm. In this scene and throughout the movie, there is very little CGI. Many times films like this will overdue the explosions or the effects, thus killing any meaning the scene could carry and brutalizing the narrative of the film. Shooter never falls into this trap, and for that reason alone, it is worth the ticket price.

The story does travel to some very unexpected places and almost does transcend the everyday thriller. Almost, but not quite. The addition of a half-cooked subplot about a massacre in an African village that somehow a U.S. Senator from Montana was behind had no place being in this movie. They went and took a nice conspiracy thriller with some great undertones of revenge and tried to make it into a story of international political intrigue. But even with these mishaps the film does achieve what it sets out to do. It is from start to finish an adrenaline-fueled thriller with a charismatic and beautifully cynical hero.

Shooter doesn't achieve the non-stop pace of The Bourne Identity and it doesn't get bogged down in theories and politics like JFK. Instead, it finds its own space somewhere in between. It never slows down long enough for you to really care about the political side, but it presents just enough substance to become more than just an action flick. Does it succeed? That's up to you.