The Good & Bad Of 'Shooter'

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2007)

THE GOOD - What a great start! The first half hour of this is outstanding and the first hour very good. It looks like, as advertised, that if you enjoyed the "Bourne" movies ("The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy") you should like this and that was the case with me.....for the first hour. Mark Walhber's "Bob Lee Swagger" is a likable hero, a good guy in every sense. Yes, he's macho, intelligent, a thoughtful, patriotic guy, etc.. The scenes where he is eluding everyone in Philadelphia in what would be an impossible dragnet lack a little credibility but they sure are fun to watch.
The first half included an interesting study on what it takes to be a good "sniper." It also had good photography and I especially liked the overhead shots of Philadelphia. The chase scenes were fun to watch, too. Near the end, the white sniper camouflage outfit Walhberg was wearing in Montana was really cool.
THE BAD - Who wrote this script? Oliver Stone? Michael Moore? The DNC? I couldn't believe all the politics - all the Liberal conspiracies and the anti-Bush Administration comments - in the last hour of this movie. First, this extreme paranoid view that everyone in the government is corrupt is vastly overworked by Hollywood and this movie is the topper where they aren't even subtle about these crackpot theories. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! Filmmakers make literally millions of dollars in this country and do nothing but bash the government. It's really worked to death in this film, more than the Bourne stories. To what extremes film writers go, just check out Elias Koteas' portrayal of government agent in here, and you get my drift. No guy in that position would act like that.
The Oliver Stone-like politics come into play big-time when Swagger meets this old guy in Tennessee who espouses every Liberal conspiracy theory that Stone likes to dish out. They still are trying to pass on all the conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination. That, and a not-so-subtle dig at WMDs, President Bush's comments why we are in Iraq, the Secretary of Defense supposedly being a liar and other negative opinions connected with the Iraq War, just keep coming after that. It's unrelenting.
They turn a decent action thriller into one big Left Wing propaganda piece. They didn't do that in the Bourne movies, but they sure spew out their political venom in here.
That's bad enough but the Rambo-mentality was an insult to all viewers, regardless of political persuasion. There had to be at least 50 trained army guys storming a house with our hero in it, along with his FBI friend, and all 50 guys are killed and the two "good guys" don't even get a scratch?! Then, a helicopter arrives with more guys shooting at them, and Swagger kills all of them, too! This is embarrassingly moronic.
OVERALL - After a great first hour, this movie dumbed down so badly in the second half that it just left me shaking my head in disbelief! How a film can be so entertaining and somewhat intelligent and go down the dumper so fast and be so stupid in the second half is staggering. It winds up being a "coulda, shoulda" movie in which we just lament how good this should have been, but wasn't