Misfire

The basic premise is très Manchurian: Living in seclusion high in the mountains following a bungled mission in Ethiopia, former gunnery sergeant Swagger is approached by a trio of government operatives (Danny Glover, Elias Koteas and Rade Sherbedgia, playing a rousing game of oilier-than-thou) who say their intelligence indicates that a sniper intends to assassinate the U.S. president in a few weeks. Only a handful of marksmen on the planet, Swagger included, could possibly hit the target from over a mile away, as would be required. Could he possibly provide them with a detailed blueprint for such an attempt? You know, how he would kill the president, if he were of a mind to, or if some malevolent dudes in designer suits wanted to make it look as if he did. And would he additionally be so obliging as to join them at the event in question, observing from a long way off, peering through binoculars, utterly oblivious to what's going on around him? That would be ideal.

Needless to say, Swagger is soon running for his life, assisted only by the widow of his former spotter (Kate Mara) and by a rookie FBI agent (Michael Peña) who does some poking around and correctly deduces that Swagger was framed. With his boyish face and befuddled demeanor, Peña (Crash, World Trade Center) makes for a far more sympathetic and compelling victim of circumstance than Wahlberg, who plays Swagger with the sort of superhuman concentration and endurance not seen since the heyday of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Wahlberg is a terrific character actor who richly deserved his Oscar nomination for The Departed, but he lacks the brute charisma necessary to command an entire screen all by his lonesome; placed at the center of attention, he reverts to clichéd Marky machismo, turning blandly hard and remote. He does, however, manage to wring a belly laugh from Swagger's most ridiculous Eastwoodism, uttered in reply to Peña's sensible suggestion that they let the police handle things: "I don't think you understand. These boys killed my dog."

The mutt dies offscreen, thankfully, which is more than can be said for the many victims of Swagger's righteous wrath. Connoisseurs of head wounds won't want to miss Shooter, which at times starts to seem like an extended remix of the Zapruder film. But what's truly galling is the way that the movie pays cynical lip service to our well-earned distrust of authority—the trail of slime ultimately leads to a red-state senator—while simultaneously effacing or ignoring the myriad complications of real-world institutional corruption. (For those, check out any season of HBO's The Wire.) Shooter's repugnant finale is a Branch Davidian wet dream, the orgiastic triumph of undue process. Incredibly, LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas sees in Swagger "the last honest exponent of old-fashioned American virtue," apparently unruffled by the former sniper's violent contempt for civil liberties. He even concludes his review with "Bob Lee Swagger for president." But we already have a president who's certain that the ends justify his means.