Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

‘Shooter’ takes aim at government conspiracy

Action films have long used corrupt government weasels and thugs as handy foils. But you’d be hard pressed to find an action film with a more cynical view of government than “Shooter.”

“There’s always someone who thinks one man can make a difference,” sneers oily, power-drunk Sen. Charles Meacham (Ned Beatty). “You gotta kill him to convince him otherwise. That’s the trouble with democracy.”

That pretty much sets the tone, as director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin, adapting Stephen Hunter’s best-selling novel, serve up a sweat-soaked, two-hour trek through the dark side of truth, justice and the American way.

The underrated Mark Wahlberg, one of my favorite actors, stars as Gunnery Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger, a legendary Marine sniper who can split heads like overripe cantaloupes from 1,000 yards.

The film opens with Bob Lee and his spotter, Donnie (Lane Garrison), on a mission in Ethiopia that quickly goes south. They’re abandoned by the higher-ups for the time-honored cause of plausible deniability, and Donnie is killed in the ensuing firefight.

Three years on, a still-haunted Bob Lee is out of the Corps, living a solitary existence on a mountaintop in the Rockies with his guns and his dog, when he gets a visit from retired Col. Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover), who claims he’s with U.S. intelligence.

Johnson says highly credible and detailed chatter has been intercepted that indicates an assassination attempt will be made on the U.S. president at one of three upcoming public venues.

Johnson needs Bob Lee to scout the sites and describe how he’d do it, so countermeasures can be devised to foil the plot. Bob Lee doesn’t trust this mook, but he’s still patriotic enough to stand up when duty calls. He agrees to come off the mountain long enough to give his assessment.

It’s a setup. The assassination target is not the president, but rather a visiting African archbishop (Dean McKenzie). The conspirators plan to take out the archbishop, then kill Bob Lee and frame him for the murder.

But despite being shot twice, Bob Lee escapes and goes on the run from a nationwide manhunt while trying to figure out how to circle back on his tormentors to exact sweet, bloody vengeance.

His only allies are Nick Memphis (Michael Peña), a rookie FBI agent who goes rogue after refusing to drink the official cover-up Kool-Aid, and Donnie’s cute but tough widow, Sarah (sultry Kate Mara).

Once the plot is in motion, it keeps moving as Bob Lee wages his own little war, to include a deafening battle at an isolated farmhouse that pits him and Nick against two dozen of Johnson’s heavily armed ex-military thugs — no contest, since Bob Lee knows how to shake and bake homemade napalm bombs from materials picked up at a local hardware store.

Along the way, the reason for the whole assassination plot is peeled away. Linking Johnson and Meacham and stretching back to that FUBAR Ethiopia mission, it’s government skullduggery at its most evil, craven, banal, self-serving worst.

It’s fantasy, of course, but what action movie isn’t? And if the framework is more than a little evocative of “The Bourne Identity/Supremacy,” well, you could do a lot worse than riff on those two fine flicks.

While the film goes well over the top on any number of fronts, it stays close enough to the edges of possibility that many people — particularly those who worry that their civil liberties are slipping away — will have no trouble diving in for a couple of hours.

“Shooter” has an appealing and sympathetic anti-hero, a hot love interest, unexpected flashes of humor, high-octane action and despicable bad guys who get all they so richly deserve.

There’s even an explanation for what really happened on that grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963.

What more could you want in an action flick?

3.5 stars. Rated R for extreme violence. Opens March 23.