Shooter

Shooter was a bit of an erratic movie. It had some cool ideas and interesting situations, but a lot of its overall structure and pacing as a film just seemed off. If you're interested in snipers, then it's a pretty enjoyable and apparently accurate idea of how a lot of it works. It stays technically truer than a lot of dumber action moves do, although sometimes it gets hard to follow since Wahlberg tends to mumble through a lot of his lines. I don't know if it was part of his character or just lazy acting, but I know he can do better than this. He does a competent job of looking jacked and messing up fools, though.

The side characters aren't terribly interesting or likable. Glover doesn't really work as a bad guy. I'm so used to him being the good guy that he'd really have to work hard to make me hate him, and he just ends up annoyingly smug. He and the other villains are a little heavy-handed representing the corruption in our current government, and a movie called Shooter probably just isn't the right vehicle for social commentary. Kate Mara looks pretty without adding much substance, and Michael Peña is the vaguely sympathetic sidekick who avoided the plot cliché I expected to see with him.

The plot is interesting if a bit typical of the genre, although it tends to wander and I felt myself losing interest. I was very tired at the time, so I'm not laying all the blame at the movie's feet. All of the scenes are directed well by Fuqua who seems to know what he's doing, and pretty much each individual scene is fine, it just doesn't fit together quite well, with climaxes in the wrong place and a bit of a strange ending that's a bloodbath without being satisfying to the resolution of the characters. There's a lot to like happening, it just seems like the script could have used a lot more tightening. It could have been better, and it could have been a lot worse.