terrible terrible ideas makes terrible terrible movies

Rating: 1/10 (31 March 2007)

First of all, I like Mark Wahlberg. He is the only reason I saw this film and I was rooting for him because he seems like a good guy and I think he can act. With that out of the way, I feel free that the reader will have no misconceptions that I am trying to slam Mark Wahlberg with my review. The movie, on the other hand, is another story. This is simply awful and derivative film-making. Plagiarism is punishable in school by expulsion. This movie copied so many others it's hard to know where it became original. I will list the movie and the way in which this film copied it: "The Bourne Identity" (highly trained agent uses his know-how to stick it to the man), "Sniper" (obvious reasons) "Arlington Road" (expert turns fall-guy), "In the Line of Fire", (Washington intrigue and assassination plot) "The Manchurian Candidate" (American hero turned brainwashed trained assassin) This film was reasonably paced and had some decent action scenes. The problem was that the people Wahlberg was killing weren't adequately identified. In much of the film, Wahlberg almost appeared to be a mindless "Jason/Micheal Meyers" type character only he used a gun instead of a machete. Gratuitous violence with no cinematic message is poor film-making.
Tip for the director, if you are going to try and make a "realistic, gritty" film keep the tone consistent throughout. You can't turn your character into a bullet-proof superman. There was never any peril for the clichéd "female interest" and the clichéd "sidekick" was lame.
Tip # 2 for the writer and director, if you are going to try and actually make sweeping geo-political statements don't load your movie up with every implausible conspiracy theory because by bundling sound and unsound ideas together you end up letting the rotten apple spoil the rest. Example: If I use the dialog of a character to impress upon the audience my belief that the Democrats and Republicans are just rich, evil, versions of the same thing, don't have the same character talk about fantastic plots to kill Kennedy or faked Moon Landing hoaxes. It just makes you look stupid.
Isn't the movie going audience in America sick of the "African tragedy device" as a plot gimmick? Anytime a screenwriter needs to portray a government official as evil, he slaughters an African village. I think more African villages have been slaughtered in bad screenplays more times that there ARE actual African villages.
Africa is screwed up enough without having to have some corrupt western political wheel screwing things up worse. Besides the "corrupt western political wheel" is the most overused cliché in these films and is the 2000's version of the black-hat wearing mustache-twisting movie villain in early silent films.