Movies: Shooter

Even if you don't find the film itself fascinating (and you won't, unless you adore "Marky" Mark Wahlberg to the degree that I do), you will find the fact of the film's existence fascinating.

The plot is simple; some military men show up at Bob Lee Swagger's (Wahlberg) cabin--isolated by snowy woods for miles, where he lives alone with his dog and his guns (he shoots his own meat)--and ask that he help them prevent a threatened presidential assassination. It seems only Swagger, an ex-military man (in)famous for his ability to successfully hit targets at great distance, will be able to intuit the assassin's plan. Swagger is happy living in isolation--we know his skill and his sentiment from watching the movie's opening scenes, in which a three years younger Swagger and his buddy come under attack from an enemy helicopter and are left to die while on a covert military operation somewhere in Africa--turns out the US Army wasn't supposed to be there, and therefore won't risk rescuing its boys. The buddy gets his guts all shot out, and Swagger calls for our first of many suspensions of disbelief by surviving (who knows how?) and getting back to the states (who cares how?), where he gets that sexy cabin with the dog and the guns.

Swagger doesn't want to leave home (who would?) but the military men (including a Congressional Medal of Honor-wielding Colonel (Danny Glover)) appeal to his patriotism and off he goes to Philly, only to be framed as the would-be assassin himself (the president isn't shot; instead, the African Cardinal to whom the president is presenting an award is killed). What unfolds from that point is a conspiracy reaching in scope from municipal (a local police officer is enlisted to shoot and kill Swagger) to federal (a Montana senator who demands Swagger's death (Ned Beatty)).

Luckily, Marky Mark is super hard-core, so with two bullets in his body, he runs away, steals a car, and drives through a high-speed chase in which his only means of escape requires him to drive the car into a river, after which point he hitches an underwater ride on a tugboat downstream, steals a truck, stops at a grocery to buy emergency first aid supplies, giving himself a MacGyver-like injection of salt and sugar water in the gas station toilet, and then drives on to arrive at the home of his old dead buddy's girlfriend-widow (Kate Mara), a hot redhead with a lusty bosom, who answers the door with a shotgun in her hand. So hard-core!

Once she has nursed him back to health (more hard-coreness there: with only Redi-Whip fumes as anesthetic, Swagger subjects the holes in his chest to the sexy-not-quite-a-widow's embroidery skills), Swagger is ready for retribution. With some research, aided along the way by an at first reluctant idiot-savant FBI freshman (Michael Pena), he unravels the conspiracy, which involves something about mass graves in Africa and possibly an oil pipeline (who cares?). Thankfully, along the way there are a lot of gun shots and explosions, as super-hard-core Swagger has brought along home-made napalm with which to suss out his enemies. In the end, all of our key players arrive on some snowy mountain tops to exchange hostages, etc., Swagger and the Colonel perform a mini-reprise of their showdown in the AG's chambers, and Swagger finally gets his just deserts by killing the crooked Senator and his pocketed Colonel while they sip brandy by the fire.

None of this is particularly fascinating, probably because there needed to be a few more explosions (seriously!). What does fascinate me, however, is the sentiment that motivates this movie, and the fact that it was therefore made. The sentiment, of course, is cynicism--deep, dark, depressing cynicism that admits not only is our government so corrupt that it profiteers on African mass graves and hides it from the American people--no; the government is so very corrupt that it will sacrifice American lives to protect its profiteering secrets. That, in and of itself, wouldn't be so fascinating--after all, many of us do harbor that cynicism, and plenty of movies have showcased it. Note, however, that those movies that showcase it are most often documentaries, or maybe sometimes dramas. But, um, hello? This is an action flick. This is a movie very much (in its many gratuitous explosions, for example) of a genre whose target market supports the government, supports the war in Iraq, supports the military, etc. (dare I say, e.g., dumb middle-American men? I really oughtn't, even if only because I'm thereby implicating myself as something I don't think I am). But, yes, I insist, there is a disjuncture between the politics of a typical action-movie-goer and the politics of this film, and it fascinates me that they coexist here.