Shooter

(Paramount Home Entertainment, 6.26.2007)

A burned-out, betrayed ex-Marine sharpshooter (Mark Wahlberg) is forced into the center of an assassination attempt on an American president we never get to see or know. The plot goes wrong, the sharpshooter is nearly killed, and he spends the remainder of the movie seeking revenge on those who screwed him over. Wahlberg's character has one of the greatest movie names in recent memory -- Bob Lee Swagger -- a carryover from Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact, on which Shooter is based. It's a great name for a televangelist... or a furniture salesman who's an extreme extrovert by day and a sad, hard drinker by night. Wahlberg makes the name work for him, in spite of the fact that no actor under the age of sixty has any right to do so.

Wahlberg's sincerity makes Shooter work. He plays decent characters because he wants to be decent himself. In a way, it's the most moving transformation an actor can undertake: by pretending to be something, you become it. As a poor teenager growing up in Boston, Wahlberg really was jailed, he really did beat up minorities, and he really was, by all accounts, destined for a lifetime of destruction and confusion.

Wahlberg's best career moves are atonements for his criminal past. It's why he would have ruined the Ocean's movies, even though he was considered for the part that went to Matt Damon. The world of Soderbergh's heist films are about guiltless movie stars swimming in the glories of their movie stardom, getting their designer suits wet from the in-joke of being so famous and beautiful and rich as to see crime as a joke. They are about the irrelevance of being world famous and the joys that can be found in the stupidity of it all. Wahlberg, meanwhile, knows pleasure can hurt you and so can crime. His mere presence would have brought the whole party to a halt.

And speaking of the Damon/Wahlberg connection, The Departed feels like a movie made from the fallout of having to cast the Ocean's films. Based on how that movie's plot turns out, maybe Wahlberg wanted Damon's part in Danny Ocean's crew more than I realized.

Beyond Wahlberg, Shooter isn't about actual American politics, it's about the anger that people are feeling towards American politics (and politicians) in general right now. Like every effective exploitation movie, it taps into the emotional currents of a moviegoing nation, rather than into a rational cerebral zeitgeist.

Built into memorable escapism is the shadow of what's being escaped from and the filmmakers behind Shooter understand this to a crosshair. Fictional politicians are hunted down and their homes are blown up while they're still inside. Pure rage is tapped, without reason and without logic. Scene after scene, great waves of bright orange explosions are countered by tiny bullet holes to the heads of the corrupt. Shooter says it's okay to be angry and hateful and hurt over the state of American politics and not have to articulate it, but just let it out.

Extras include an audio commentary with director Antoine Fuqua, a standard making-of featurette, a featurette on the history of Philadelphia -- where a pivotal scene takes place -- and several deleted scenes. -- Jason Woloski