Shooter

dir: Antoine Fuqua
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It feels a bit wrong reviewing a film called Shooter considering what just happened in the States a little while ago at Virginia Tech, where 32 people lost their lives at the hands of a crazed, but utterly calm gunman. However, in this courageous ‘reviewer’ caper, you have to occasionally suck it up, as they say, and get on with the job. Be a trooper, soldier on through, above and beyond the call of duty.

Because as awful as that mass slaying must be for all those people who lost loved ones, and for those who lost people they kind of didn’t mind, and for those people who had people who they couldn’t stand cruelly and violently taken from them: it’s just as hard on those of us who have to hear about it.

It’s at moments like these that entertainment becomes most crucial: It’s time to laugh again. So why shouldn’t people go and see a film where a cool, calm guy with a gun kills a shitload of people?

I can’t think of a single reason why not. This is a proudly American film about an American hero taking on the corrupt American system in the only way an American (at least on film, certainly not in reality) deals with conflict: by shooting lots of people. The Way of the Gun indeed.

It’s not really within my job description as a reviewer to launch into an incredulous tirade about America’s relationship with guns right now. It seems tasteless to point out the amazing status guns have within their society when 32 innocent people, way down on an average day in Iraq, are shot to death. But I will say that both events are products of their era, and their culture.

Shooter is an action thriller about a true American patriot called Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, who is very good at his job. It’s wonderful to have someone lionised for his professionalism, it truly is. Swagger is played by Mark Wahlberg, who, as actors go, has the same relationship to them generally that anti-matter has to matter: the fundamental opposite. He is an anti-actor. Sometimes he goes so far off the anti-actor scale that he occasionally goes all the way around again and almost achieves existence as an actor. Almost.

I cannot buy him in any role, and only occasionally have thought his performances were even adequate. His most famous role cast him as a deluded moron with a very large cock who didn’t realise he was a deluded moron. Almost perfect, in a way. With pretty much everything else he’s ever done, you can’t usually get past the “hey, that’s Marky Mark / Dirk Diggler” factor.

In Shooter he does a decent enough job, because he isn’t allowed to try to act. He can’t act anyway. In the same way that the best way you can prevent someone who can’t dance from dancing badly is by not letting them dance in the first place, they pare down what he does to bare essentials that don’t let him try to overtake the scenery.

Yeah, so maybe that isn’t entirely true. At the very least his version of acting in this film doesn’t aggravate me as much as it usually does.

As the hero, he is tricked into becoming a scapegoat for a presidential assassination. He is in that position in the first place because he is one of the most incredible snipers the military has ever produced. He could, with the right sniper rifle and spotter, shoot the dick off a fly trapped on the still moving tongue of a frog from over a mile away.

The film gets to show off the incredible set of skills possessed by the world’s elite snipers, which makes you wonder why more people aren’t assassinated every day. The film goes into substantial detail to outline the complexity of what they do, though of course the main focus of the proceedings is being entertaining. And the flick certainly manages to be that.

It doesn’t pause long enough for boredom to set in, or for the niggling questions to arise and swamp your attention, at least until the credits roll. It is well shot, well edited without going completely over the top, and, for a contemporary action film, completely avoids the shaky camera stuff that usually drives me bonkers.

As everyone in America thinks he just took a shot at the President, that hallowed being of infinite might and powerful faculties, Swagger is on the run with nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Only two people, the unlikely-named FBI agent Nick Memphis (Michael Pena), and Sarah (Kate Mara), the widow of his dead army buddy, are on his side.

But we know the truth. We know, as does Swagger (what a name for a protagonist: it’s as descriptive and unimaginative as if they’d called him Dirk Diggler again, or Johnson Allcock Studly, or Tad Sexington), that there is some evil cabal within the government, led by evil Colonel Johnson (Danny Glover, who is not as teeth-grindingly bad as he usually is), the evil Colonel’s guard dog (Elias Koteas), and an evil Dr Strangelove type in a wheelchair (Rade Serbedzija). The evilness goes up even higher, with evil senators, evil government officials and even evil lollipop ladies. You know, the people who wear those goofy outfits and who hold the signs at children’s school crossings. Pure evil.

There are plenty of contemporary references in this flick that could have just as easily come out during the 80s. Abu Ghraib, the use of torture, calling people terrorists who are really patriots; there’s plenty there to make it seem all current and new. It has a healthy disdain for the government, though it doesn’t imply any ideological side is any better than any other, since those with the ‘real’ power are amoral opportunists anyway. So, though it seems like a product of the jingoistic 80s, it’s really more a product of the war-weary and cynical 00s.

That aspect gets more and more explicit as the flick goes on, to the point where I have to reluctantly admit that it comes across as the kind of vigilante – paramilitary fantasy that used to delight American audiences at least until Timothy McVeigh gave those gun nut separationists all a bad name. It exemplifies the mentality that the kind of guys who were stockpiling cans of soup and rounds of ammunition prior to the year 2000 in hopeful expectation of kickin’ ass in a post-apocalyptic America prized. You know, the people who were actually disappointed when everything didn’t go to shit.

This level of paranoid paramilitary fantasy asserts this elegantly simple idea: when the government becomes overly corrupt, the only solution is to trim the deadwood using a high-powered sniper rifle. The system is corrupt, the legal system is unenforceable, so it’s up to the real patriot to take justice into their own hands. Their own gun-toting, cold dead hands.

Such a message seems even more fascist than usual these days, but as Leni Riefenstahl proved with her Nazi-lovin’ films like Triumph of the Will, in the right hands, such material is gold, pure gold baby. And entertaining, as well.

I should probably not derive as much pleasure from films like this as I do. There’s just something about snipers that I find quite fascinating, to be honest. Not just the prospect of killing someone from a great distance, although that’s appealing all in itself. The thing is, as depicted, the right guy with the right weapon means that no-one on this planet is safe. If a person can shoot you between the eyes from more than a kilometre away, you’re never really that safe.

Except in your bunker, of course. Your well-stocked bunker. Your bunker with the complex ventilation system, the generator and the pictures of Margaret Thatcher dressed as Rambo and Stallone dressed as Thatcher on the wall. That’s the only place you’re truly warm and safe.

With weapons like the sniper rifles depicted, and even more lethal weapons like Bob Lee Swagger swaggering all over the place, I’m amazed that people like Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and half of Palestine are still alive if it’s this easy and convenient from such a healthy distance to do away with them.

Hell, I’m amazed that I’m still walking around some days. It’s probably a good thing most people can’t get their hands on these kinds of weapons, at least here. Or, then again, if I believe the pro-gun lobby now spin doctoring madly in the States, it would be better if we ALL had these kind of guns. Then we’d really be safe.

It makes for an entertaining two hours. After all, that’s all I ask. How better to forget the gun-totin’ troubles of the world, than by sitting down to a good action thriller where might and telescopic sight makes right?

7 times enjoying competent action thrillers makes me as morally corrupt as the villains out of 10

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“You don’t understand – These men killed my dog.” – well, then they got what they deserved in your universe, Shooter.

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