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In the 90s, a film like Shooter may well have been one of the major summer blockbusters, but since then the stakes and budgets have raised, and now it is just another April release. Fundamentally it's a fairly straightforward innocent-on-the-run flick where the wrongly accused man happens to be a former US army sniper. Mark Wahlberg makes his first appearance since his Oscar-nominated part in The Departed, and proves very capable as the descriptively-named Bob Lee Swagger, a role that's something like Jason Bourne without the amnesia. Antoine Fuqua directs with little individuality but he knows how to film an action scene, as the film is provided with a generous helping of them, starting off with a well-staged shootout in Ethiopia before getting into the actual meat of the story. The plot certainly allows for plenty of location hopping (albeit mostly in America), meaning that there's no shortage of variety in the scenery. It's a great looking film all round, with the photography of the Rocky Mountains especially striking.
The film gets off to a very promising start and I found the first hour or so excellent, but as the bodycount mounts up the film steadily becomes more and more far-fetched. It's refreshing in a way to see an action film that apparently has no motive other than simply to entertain - there's no Blood Diamond-esque tacked-on moralising, even though the Iraq war is mentioned a couple of times - but that doesn't mean it has to be implausible. On a couple of occasions Wahlberg's character was pretty careless in a way that a veteran army sniper wouldn't be, seemingly just in the cause of a couple more action scenes. Thankfully, as already mentioned, the action scenes are excellent, and it's always fun to see snipers do what they do best. Shooter defiantly ticks all the standard boxes in the genre, but it is a well-made slice of action hokum. If you take a pinch of The Fugitive, a dash of The Bourne Identity, and add more sniping, you get Shooter.
The summary
Shooter is efficient, slightly implausible but explosive entertainment, and sometimes that's exactly what you want.
