Tuesday

I finally saw Shooter today. I say 'finally' because I mean 'finally'. I've been trying to see it for weeks. This is the new film from Antoine Fuqua, the man who directed the brilliant Training Day. Unfortunately, this movie does not live up to that one. In many ways, the plot here is not much better than Rambo, and never rises much above the level of an 'intelligent action movie'. There are contentious issues - genocide, American exploitation of developing countries and their irresponsible use of superior force - but these don't drive the film, they are subsidiary. I also didn't fully sympathise with the characters, and fully hate the enemies. Their choices along the way weren't always self-evident. I was frequently lost as to what they were doing and why they were doing it. The film didn't end, but not in a good way, issues weren't resolved. Someone says at one point 'you can't kill human weakness with a gun'. This, to me, therefore undermines the ending of the movie. The script was good, but somehow lost. There were a lot of great lines, but not delivered well, or emphasised enough by the direction. The music also doesn't help at all here - a kind of faux-epic, sentimental thing. The woman's character seemed fairly irrelevant, and although it luckily didn't develop into a full-romance, it might as well have done. The man who plays the FBI agent, Michael Peña was very good, and I thought that this film would've done better to be centred around him instead. His character, and his story, is more interesting than the Rambo-type one. Wahlberg is great again, but his character was far too one-dimensional: a good guy wronged by the government. So I am still interested to see what Fuqua does next, but not as interested as I was before I saw this film.