well-worn storyline with some refreshing elements

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2007)

Though little more than a strung-together collection of man-on-the-run, action movie clichés, "Shooter" provides a veritable feast for conspiracy-theory paranoiacs and a decent enough time at the movies for the rest of us.
Mark Wahlberg plays Bob Lee Swagger, an embittered ex-marine gunnery sergeant who's been living a hermitlike existence ever since he and his sharpshooter buddy were left to perish on an Ethiopian hillside by the American forces that had sent them on the mission in the first place. After three years holed up in the wilderness of Wyoming with no one but his devoted pooch to keep him company, Swagger is coaxed out of retirement by the FBI to help foil a planned assassination of the President of the United States. When Swagger discovers at the last minute that he is actually being set up as the fall guy for the killing, he barely escapes with his life and spends the rest of the movie dodging the authorities while attempting to clear his name and bring the true culprits to justice.
Wahlberg, all brooding stoicism and macho-man swagger (pardon the pun), continues his run of tough guy roles in this film, though one wishes he would return to the more nuanced, multi-layered portrayals he managed to put forth in movies like "Boogie Nights" and "Three Kings." As the woman who befriends Swagger, the attractive and talented Kate Mara has considerably more screen time in this film than she did in "Brokeback Mountain," but far less worthy material to work with. The most compelling performance is by Michael Pena as the low-level FBI agent who believes Swagger is innocent of the crime and who winds up joining forces with Swagger to uncover the conspiracy. The Average Joe demeanor that Pena brings to the character provides a proper counterbalance to Wahlberg's strutting self-confidence and superhuman athleticism. Danny Glover seems to be phoning in much of his performance here as the leader of the covert FBI cabal, and Ned Beatty does his best as a stereotypically smarmy senator who's up to his ears in venality and corruption.
The plot often doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it is easy for a layperson to get lost in all the arcane machinations that come flying fast and loose off the screen. Still, the screenplay does a nice job fitting the pieces of its puzzle together, merging the two story lines that run along parallel tracks for the first half into a unified whole at about the midway point. The action scenes are strikingly well done, even though they often sacrifice verisimilitude and plausibility for mass explosions and preposterously lopsided gun battles.
The movie makes a lot of grand speeches at the end about governmental corruption and what it truly means to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but "Shooter" is designed to be a generic thriller not a big-think social drama. And, on those terms only, the movie succeeds more often than it fails.