Shooter

Conspiracy stories are the post-modern era’s religion. The powers that shape, control, and run the world are so distant that one can’t help but ask “what if”? Ancient man told fireside tales of gods chasing the sun across the sky. Modern man tells tales of grassy knolls, rigged elections, and government conspiracies that suppress the poor for the gain of the rich.

This makes great material for movies. One man fighting to uncover the truth hidden by a shadowy, all-powerful cabal is the setup for countless exciting movies. Unfortunately, with its ham-handed execution, Shooter misfires.

The premise is intriguing on paper: what if the lone gunman was the good guy? Mark Wahlberg plays Bud Lee Swagger, a reclusive ex-military sniper who gets recruited to stop a presidential assassination. Yes, that’s really the characters name. Sadly, instead of living up to such a colorful, good ol’ boy moniker, Wahlberg appears to have been directed by an angry swarm of bees. There’s an awful lot of angry squinting going on, and even though he can put a bullet in a can of stew from a mile away, you want to suggest that he get his eyes checked.

Antoine Fuqua, the director, is compiling a body of work that examines heroic machismo. His leading men are dripping masses of testosterone, trapped in a dogged pursuit of a single-minded goal and ready to engage in any necessary acts of violence to achieve it. Bruce Willis slogged through Tears Of The Sun and Clive Owen moped through King Arthur. Fuqua most notably presided over Training Day with Denzel Washington, which is one of the most beguiling and incandescent performances captured on film in recent years. Washington’s bad cop was an evil, charismatic bully; pure greed and power and sexual rapaciousness running unchecked. When he was on screen, it’s almost impossible to look away.

Unfortunately, Willis and Owen didn’t fare nearly as well under Fuqua’s direction. Tears Of The Sun was a lugubrious mess, and King Arthur almost unwatchably murky. In Children Of Men, Owen almost succeeds in making a silent mope of a guy into a compelling hero. Wahlberg was Oscar nominated for his volatile (and Training Day worthy) performance in The Departed. Willis, Owen, and Wahlberg have all turned in charismatic, intense performances elsewhere, but Fuqua reduces all of them to stoic wooden caricatures, leaving Denzel Washington as the lone standout. Why?

He gets to be the bad guy. Denzel’s character Alonzo is Training Day’s Tyler Durden. He’s an unrepressed, unchecked raw masculine ego. He can shoot, fight, and fuck better than you can, and he won’t think about apologizing for it. By contrast, the inappropriately named Swagger is all furrowed brow and weepy conscience. He’s unafraid to kill when necessary, but there’s nothing enjoyable about it. Stoicism might be a noble ideal, but in Fuqua’s vision, it’s tedious and unenlightening to watch.

The bigger problem with Shooter is that we know the first act of the story before it even begins. Swagger is going to be set up by the Conspiracy, and then he’s going to be on the run. But first, we get to watch him play with his dog, walk around Philadelphia, and squint some more. Since Swagger is a two-dimensional cutout and oddly gullible, watching the setup is an exercise in patience. The Conspiracy, as headed by a rasping Danny Glover, is two ounces of mustache wax away from cartoon villain status. The sniper-speak sounds real, but there’s nothing engaging about it. I’m sure that humidity and wind speed can effect how my toaster works, too, but reading that chapter of the manual with a snarling face is not engaging.

For all the long-range shot heroics, there are few moments with a finger on the trigger. Nowhere does the film really get inside that lonely position of taking someone’s head off from close to a mile away. It should be a lonely, fascinating position of awareness and single-minded purpose. Instead, Shooter is more concerned with a conspiracy so unwieldy that it veers away from plausibility entirely. As a result, it just misfires blindly from chase to chase, hoping that sheer grimness will substitute for excitement. Shadowy forces with an army of mercenaries on the payroll still have to rely on a complicated setup that in the penultimate moment hinges on a two-bit, doughnut eating city cop? If that sounds believable, then let’s have a little chat about the grassy knoll.