Testosterone-Driven Revenge Thriller Too Heavy on Polemics and Too Light on Characters

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2007)

Surprisingly, for an elaborately staged revenge action piece, this 2007 movie is too politically ambitious for its own good. Director Antoine Fuqua knows how to stage an over-the-top battle and a desperate chase scene with plenty of eye-popping firepower and expert stunt work, but along with screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin, he also wants to make the story a topical commentary on the current political landscape. They are caught in cross purposes that don't mesh well at all, especially toward the end, because the movie is basically a man-on-the-run B-picture with an A-picture budget.
Based on "Point of Impact", a suspense novel by Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, the densely plotted story focuses on the aptly named Bobby Lee Swagger, a former military sniper who happens to be one of the most expert marksmen ever. Abandoned by the U.S. military during a deadly secret mission in Ethiopia, he has since become a mountain-man survivalist who is recruited three years later by a shadowy figure, Col. Isaac Johnson, to help prevent a predicted assassination attempt on the President. A sudden, Hitchcockian twist occurs a little over the half-hour mark, and the rest of the movie is a series of convolutions that spiral completely out of control by the overblown series of finales.
All of this may have had a chance for resonance if the characters were developed beyond the level of action figures. Looking seriously self-possessed, Mark Wahlberg does his best to make Swagger a more dimensional character than the Rambo-constrained script demands, but the film doesn't give him much breathing room beyond his angst over his spotter's death and his burgeoning anger at the U.S. government. On the latter point, he suddenly articulates his perspective like a McLaughlin Group commentator, one of many laughable elements that seem to multiply once Swagger takes charge of his mission of vengeance. As the initially reluctant FBI agent who searches for the truth, Michael Peña brings much needed humanism to the story, but his character's arc is absurdly presented in broad strokes.
With a convincing Kentucky accent, Kate Mara looks at first to be playing the spotter's widow as a feisty, vulnerable figure, but she is reduced almost systematically to a nearly mute damsel-in-distress as the story progresses. Similarly, Danny Glover plays Johnson with some interesting texture at the beginning but then quickly moves into Simon Legree territory. The worst casting occurs late in the movie with Ned Beatty as a pompous U.S. senator pivotal in the political conspiracy behind Swagger's set-up. A far cry from the Machiavellian corporate tycoon he played in "Network", Beatty plays to the rafters with zero subtlety. Still, it is hard not to be impressed with the film's technical aspects, particularly the sharp cinematography of Peter Menzies, Jr. and the propulsive editing by Conrad Buff and Eric Sears. Lemkin's polemic-heavy script, however, cannot begin to elevate the movie beyond its testosterone-driven genre.