Off the Mark

Shooter Directed by Antoine Fuqua

With its bilious references to Bush-era scandals, such as Abu Ghraib and the search for WMDs, Shooter is a film with the potential to unite Timothy McVeigh separatists, Move On progressives and action movie fans with a taste for body counts and bloodletting. Shooter’s paramilitary formula for post-9/11 success is Soldier of Fortune basic: keep an arsenal in the living room, a vegetable patch in the yard and a muscle getaway car idling—because this country is going to hell.

Stupendously obvious in its divisions between patriot virtue and money-grubbing vice, Training Day director Antoine Fuqua’s Shooter is cinema as purgative—a big-budget high colonic to the American political system and a sense of impotent rage against the machine. With its blend of political outrage and bloody spectacle, Shooter is both cathartic and cringe-inducing, getting the heart pumping and the vitals in a twist, with a high body count and country fried spirit indebted to lowbrow Mason-Dixon drive-in fare.

As a Marine marksman who’s been double-crossed by military contractors, Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) has holed up on an off-the-grid mountaintop with a copy of The 9/11 Commission Report on his desk and a Budweiser-fetching dog at his feet.

Swagger’s rocky top idyll is disrupted by a fresh cadre of government men led by a retired Colonel (Danny Glover), who flashes his Congressional Medal of Honor like a business card and dangles before him the chance to save the President from an assassination plot. A patriot who believes in America but just thinks it might need better management, Swagger takes the bait—though he soon finds himself caught up in another rogue contractor’s scheme of blood-for-oil abroad.

Big gun Swagger is aided in his effort to flush out the assassination’s real culprits by a baby-faced FBI agent (Michael Peña) and a Kentucky spitfire, Sarah Fenn (Kate Mara), whose pulchritude plays second fiddle to copious money shots of Wahlberg’s pecs. Like some plucky combination of Mrs. Miniver and Daisy Duke, Sarah is an alpha gal who answers the door in a tank top toting a loaded gun and is equally accomplished at stitchin’, nursin’ and—when the occasion warrants—killin’.

With precedents in the vigilante cinema of Walking Tall, Taxi Driver and First Blood, Swagger’s another former-soldier answering corruption with an Old Testament rain of blood; an Army of One in a film that hopes to mirror the incoherent, futile rage of the American public.

Everyone’s a cynic in Shooter’s take-down of America’s corporate government—from hoodwinked patriot Swagger to pink-faced Senator Charles F. Meachum (Ned Beatty), one of the capitalist supervillains chortling over brandy and cigars about their crimes against humanity.

Like a vitamin rolled up in a charbroiled burger, there’s something worthwhile inside Shooter—a river of utter outrage at the den of thieves running the country—but you have to eat a lot of carcinogenic shit to get to it.

Shooter tries to cop a moral purpose, but loves nothing more than the videogame thrill kill sight of skull caps flying through the air like Frisbees and a Jackson Pollock splatter of brains on plaster. While Shooter is never a great—or even a good—film, it is the perfect encapsulation of the contradictory political apathy and rage of our times, and there’s something compelling in that.