A good action movie which doesn't seriously attempt to get above B status

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2014)

You see how bad a producer is when you have a hefty (A) budget and the result feels more like a B movie. The production values in Shooter are excellent in terms of action scenes and locations, but when it comes to characters and 'plot finesse' this could as well have been a direct-to-video pot-boiler.
The best and the worse are bundled, as a summary of things to come, in the fine prologue: it does establish pretty well the work of a shooter and his pointer as an excellent plot device, but only a couple of minutes into the movie the pointer gets a picture of his fiancée out of his notebook. You don't need to have seen that many movies to guess what will happen to him in the next few minutes.
The story is very exciting and the script offers great action sequences, but in between the narrative is not very tense - especially as we switch between the hero, the FBI agent(s) and the private contractor guys, in the pivotal moments after the Philadelphia plot. The ending also feels disjointed and in your face: after the grand-scale shootout there is no longer a sense of immediacy and emergency, it's only about putting that scene here to tell this and that and bring the whole thing to a close.
If action is the best part of Shooter, characters are really the weakest. Everyone is either wooden or one-dimensional - sometimes both - so absolutely nobody shines in there! Mark Whalberg is as stiff as ever and his character doesn't even allow him to be more than this massive sharpshooting nerd while Danny Glover is nowhere edgy enough for his part. And at best the rest of the cast is giving the most out of the flimsy secondary characters.
A good action movie, to watch once despite its poor development, perfect to keep you awake during a 2h flight.