He shoots, he scores!

Rating: 6/10 (20 April 2007)

WARNING: contains bloody obvious spoilers.
Marky Mark is back and watch out, this time he's got a gun! The former boy bander stretches himself as an emotionally anaemic solider who goes into early retirement after a botched Ethiopian mission (another one!) and is recruited by Danny Glover, here lisping for no good reason whatsoever, to out think a would-be presidential assassin who like Walhberg, is a marksman par excellence. Of course if you don't spot that the former rapper is being set up very early on and that said marksman is a figment of Glover's imagination, you're an idiot and deserve the bullet even more than our hero. Framed for an assassination (he's a expert in being invisible but manages to be photographed doing a recce of assassination sites everywhere), our man goes on the run but it's not long before he's, er, enlisting the help of the wanton and see through top wearing Kate Mara, the wife of his dead former partner, to expose the conspiracy and pop a cap in the bad guys.
Shooter is great fun, if formulaic to the point of fracture. People actually have lines like "he's supposed to be the best" and the stab at political zeitgeist sampling is as clumsy as our hero's delivery, Walberg having swallowed Stephen Hawkins' computerised voice box for reasons never explained.
Walhberg's delivery is as as quick as machine gun fire and just as indiscriminate in its victims. He sounds like a replicant with a damaged emotion chip - in fact he's so dry that he could be a boy reading out lines from a play in an English lesson. Nevertheless there's something about his faux seriousness that really entertains and although he's consistently as animated as Peter Falk's glass eye, there's an reassuring bluntness to the Marky Mark cinematic experience that delivers, just as Jack Nicolshon is always Jack, Sid James Sid and Michael Caine, er, well...
Having said all that this is never offensively bad, in fact as alluded to already, the Markster is quite endearing, if a little trigger happy and Ned Beatty, in a thought you were dead bit part, is appropriately slimy as the bent Senator who you long for Walhberg to give serious lead poisoning. It entertainingly veers from a patriotic exercise in defending democratic ideals to a not so crypto-fascist manifesto for dealing with corrupt lawmakers. Rule of law? Just load up and tell me where they're going to be.
Fast paced, fun and packed the occasionally pleasing set-piece, Shooter is much better than a bullet in the head but whoever told Danny Glover to put a cotton bud against his lower lip and slur every other word deserves a visit from Walhberg in the very near future.