A straight to video action film that found it's way onto the big screen

Rating: 4/10 (3 November 2007)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Whalberg) was a soldier who's best friend was killed on a mission that went wrong. Since then he's been in seclusion up in the hills- until he's approached by a government agent (Danny Glover) with a proposition- stage a hit on a US senator. With his expert knowledge and professionalism, Swagger agrees- only to find himself set up for a real assassination attempt and in a desperate race for his life.
With the first three films of his that I've seen, Antoine Fuqua has proved he can deliver on all levels of quality, from excellent (Training Day), to average (Tears of the Sun) and then downright awful (King Arthur.) With this rather precise decline in quality from film to film, I really had to sit and wonder just what kind of film Shooter would turn out to be. The answer: average again.
I know he'd made a few films before it, most notably 1998's The Replacement Killers with Chow Yun-Fat and Mira Sorvino, but TD was the film that really pushed Fuqua into the big time with Denzel's Oscar win. What happened to that film's raw, dynamic intensity and tense, powerful atmosphere? Why was it just not present in the next few films he made?
This is a total pot-boiler of an action film, with every cliché in the book trotted out in rapid succession and a mumbling Whalberg as our action hero, along with a supporting cast including Glover, Elias Koteas and Ned Beatty who don't seem too excited either. The film has a very cheap look to it for a film that went to theatres, with some iffy looking CGI and fake model helicopters, as well as a total lack of any exciting action. It's defenders might say it has an intelligent, twisty-turny, Bourne-esquire plot that you have to pay attention to, but I paid for action and Shooter had it's sight crooked.
It's better than KA, but this is still a bland, uninspiring effort all the way, one to nod off to when you need to get an early night. A damp squib from a director who started with such power. **