What did you feel the first time you shot someone? The recoil of the rifle!

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2008)

***SPOILER ALERT*** Straight out of both today's and yesterday's headline "Shooter" is without a doubt the best and most explosive political action film since Oliver Stone's "JFK" that was released back in 1991. The film centers around an uncovered plot to assassinate the President of the United States played by Tom Butler. This has the FBI CIA and Secret Services trying to find out how it would be done with the sniper, who's to do the hit, planning to accomplish the task from a distance of as much as a mile away.
Contacting a former top US Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, Mark Wahlberg, the Secret Service wants to get Swagger to narrow down the three cities that the President is to give an out door address over the next 30 days, when the planned assassination is to take place, to prevent that from happening. Finding Philadelphia as the perfect place for the assassination to be successfully executed Bob Lee Swagger is also to later finds out that he in fact is the pasty chosen, by those behind the scenes, to take the fall for murdering the President of the United States!
Everything goes perfectly with President Butler, who had no knowledge of what was happening, in fact used as a ploy to knock off guest speaker Ethiopian Archbishop Desmond Mutubo, Dean McKenzie, who's the real target of the assassination attempt! Knowing within seconds that he's been set up in Mutubo's assassination Swagger makes his escape after being shot by Officer Simmions, Alan Peterson, who's in on the assassination plot, and who's later murdered himself, and is on the run for the remainder of the film.
There's the usual and expected heroics by innocent fugitive from the law Swagger who with the help of his former and dead US Marine buddy Donnie Fenn's, Lane Garrison, wife Sarah, Kate Mara, and rookie FBI Agent Nick Memphis, Michael Pena, eventually uncovers who was behind Archbishop Mutubo's assassination. Swagger soon realizes that he in fact was unwittingly responsible for a mass murder committed by a rouge US Government agency headed by the mysterious Col. Isaac Johnson, Danny Glover, some three years ago in Ethiopia! It was this knowledge and his willingness to reveal it to the American public that lead to Archbishop Mutubo's murder!
The movie "Shooter" is filled with shocking revelation in how people high up in the US Government use their office and the power that goes along with it to commit crimes worthy of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union! What makes "Shooter" so effective and at the same time disturbing is that a lot of what it brings out in its storyline you can read and see in your local newspaper or network TV news show!
The only thing about the film that's way off target is its very feel good ending that, despite being one of the best and most exciting sequences of the movie, ruins its credibility which was the best part about it up until then. Still "Shooter" is not a movie to be ignored, even though many high up in government would want you to, since its one of the most accurate conspiracy film to ever come out of Hollywood! And thats saying something in these troubled times where after 9/11, in fact there's a scene in the movie where Swagger is seen reading a book titled "9/11", where publicly being critical, like "Shooter" is, of the government can get you either fired from your job or disappeared into a government run hell hole detention camp like Gitmo or Abu Ghraib!