Review – Shooter

This is one of those Hollywood productions that leave me wondering about the development process. Did this begin life as a clever script that got dumbed down into a run-of-the-mill action movie, or did it start as a standard, stupid thriller and end up with a few good bits stirred in at some point in the rewrite just to make it a bit more interesting? I suspect the former. In any event, the conspiracy stuff is a lot of fun. In particular, I was actually impressed by the scene with the ballistics expert in Tennessee. Unfortunately, such gems are few and far between. For the most part this is a brain-dead intrigue vehicle. Mark Wahlberg plays an expert sniper who gets framed for an assassination. His attempts to evade capture as he works to clear his name are cookie cutter action movie stuff. The occasional clever bits got my hopes up, leaving me wanting the plot to advance via interesting twists and turns rather than more brutish, empty-headed shooting and explosions. For the most part those hopes were dashed, especially by the ending. Actually, the movie had three points at which it could easily have ended, and the final one left me with a profound sense of, “if that’s how you were going to wrap it up, you could have done it 20 minutes ago.” I suppose I’ve seen worse, but this could have been a lot better than it was. Mildly amusing