Movie Review: Shooter
Shooter, a tremendously entertaining thriller directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), takes place in a contemporary America where everyone is out to get the president; where government officials cover up human rights travesties in Africa; and where the sinister senator from Montana (Ned Beatty) looks suspiciously like a certain ex-congressman from Wyoming named Dick Cheney.
The movie is torn from about a year's worth of newspaper headlines, all of which have been ingeniously jumbled together to suggest that the entire military-industrial complex, Republicans and Democrats alike, is out to destroy the common American man's dreams. Shooter is ferociously angry about the state of current affairs and poignantly earnest in its belief that there's got to be a better way; it's like a Frank Capra movie with all guns blazing.
Based on a novel called Point of Impact by Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter (the screenplay adaptation is by Jonathan Lemkin), it's also another terrific showcase for Mark Wahlberg, who in recent few years has unexpectedly emerged as the most confident and likable leading man of his generation. Wahlberg was the best thing in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, both dryly acerbic and quietly menacing as the movie's unlikely moral bellwether; he was even better -- understated, graceful, deeply comfortable in his own skin -- as former Philadelphia Eagles player Vince Papale in Invincible.
In Shooter, Wahlberg plays Bob Lee Swagger, a brawny, ponytailed former marksman who retired from the military after his best friend was killed in combat. This is a familiar action-movie hero type, but Wahlberg uses his soft voice and doleful eyes to extraordinary effect. Withdrawn from society (he lives in the mountains with his dog) and mad at the world, Swagger is meant to suggest some sort of Unabomber type -- he's one raw deal away from turning into a sociopath.
But Wahlberg finds the character's human side, namely that Swagger still believes sincerely in the lofty democratic ideals of his country and his government. That's why he's willing, when Secret Service agents mysteriously show up at his doorstep, to agree to help them foil a presidential assassination attempt.
Of course, nothing is quite as it seems, and instead of foiling the shooting, which ends up killing not the president but a visiting African dignitary, Swagger is framed for the crime. At which point, he escapes from the FBI's clutches and sets off on a cross-country journey to prove his innocence and expose the evildoers.
Part of the fun of Shooter is the way it tips its hat to such "wrong man" classics as North by Northwest and The Fugitive, those globe-trotting fantasies that allow us to exorcise our deepest anxieties about getting punished for sins we didn't actually commit. Fuqua and Lemkin inch that fantasy just far enough into the realm of reality -- there are references throughout the film to the Iraq War -- without ever allowing the proceedings to turn too depressing.
As the story unfolds, Swagger makes his way to the house of his deceased friend's widow (Kate Mara), a nursing school dropout who miraculously performs surgery on him. He then manages to convince a rookie FBI agent named Nick Memphis (Michael Pena) of his innocence, and they purchase what looks to be about $20,000 worth of camouflage equipment and weapons in order to lay a trap for the bad guys in the snow-covered mountains of Montana. The sheer preposterousness of all this only adds to our enjoyment; like The Bourne Supremacy, Shooter is that rare film adaptation of pulp fiction that remains true to the page-turning brio of the source material. That's not as easy as it sounds -- just ask the makers of The Da Vinci Code.
The core of Shooter is so solid that you might not notice how much care Fuqua and Lemkin have taken with the details, from the ace supporting cast (including Danny Glover, Elias Koteas and Rhona Mitra) to the verisimilitude of the screenplay, which teaches us more about ballistics than most of us probably care to know. This is the kind of movie where even a seemingly throwaway scene -- Swagger and Memphis visiting an artillery expert (Levon Helm) in Tennessee, for instance -- crackles with energy and dark humor.
As for the film's oddball politics -- half-liberal, half-libertarian, anti-Bush, pro-gun -- well, I'm not sure any of it makes much sense. But in addition to recalling old-school Hitchcock classics and more modern one-man-army epics like Die Hard, Shooter also harkens backs to those Watergate-era thrillers like The Parallax View and Chinatown, where no one, least of all a politician in a suit, was to be trusted.
This is borderline revolutionary stuff: A 21st-century Hollywood popcorn movie that dares its audience to think.
***
