Michael Pena and Mark Wahlberg star in Paramount Pictures' film 'Shooter.'

To see or not to see?

Shot down: Wahlberg film is tolerable

By: Jason Deuterman

Posted: 3/27/07

Lock. Load. Click. Boom. What else screams Americana like a good ol' fashioned shoot-'em up rooted in the cliché tale of revenge? The answer: absolutely nothing.

And who better to deliver on a film smeared with red, white and blue than director Antoine Fuqua? Audiences love to see heads explode through crosshairs, and that is exactly what they get in Fuqua's "Shooter;" perhaps even more than they paid for.

There is something exceptionally entertaining embedded in that carnal hunger in which humans wish to get even, and countless bodies fall. Once a gunnery sergeant in a scout sniper division of the U. S. military, Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and country. Upon retiring to a mountaintop cabin after a failed mission in Ethiopia, Swagger is called back into action - this time to protect the life of the president.

Yet, Swagger is locked into conspiracy and is made the scapegoat on which a few corrupt government officials place the blame for an attempt on the president's life. Thus the shooting begins as Swagger makes it his patriotic obligation to take revenge and endeavor to reclaim his good name, all the while ridding power from those who blemish the American way.

Often times to the point of hilarity, Jonathan Lemkin's screenplay - based upon the novel "Point of Impact" by Stephen Hunter - is laced with political slurs blatantly directed at conservative government. Yet, such bears well as the Second Amendment takes on a whole new meaning for Wahlberg's character. No longer killing Ethiopian guerillas, Swagger takes the lives of multitudes of American, paramilitary commandos under the command of a rogue colonel.

Whether engulfed in homemade napalm or dropped from a hollow-point round, Fuqua ensures that Swagger's adversaries go boom in a spray of blood. Wahlberg becomes an American version of James Bond - a less refined but always sincere character, not with a license, but more of a mandate to kill.

"Shooter" is satisfyingly entertaining, which retrospectively, is an eerie notion to accept. Why does one find it fulfilling to watch consecutive heads explode? Because that's the American way.