Shooter.

"Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly.

"There is something unaccountably gratifying, at times reassuring about watching the screen - the bigger the better - become engulfed by surging waves of liquid orange, in the image of a car exploding into the air like a rocket, in a room, a building, a boat, a truck, you name it, shattering into confetti," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[Director Antoine] Fuqua, the auteur of such rococo diversions as Training Day and Tears of the Sun, likes to keep the volume cranked and the action relentless. Like many contemporary action directors, he overshoots and overedits, cramming his films with inexplicable, unnecessary visual and aural noise. This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It's also pretty enjoyable."

Updated through 3/26.

The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, Stephen Hunter, wrote the novel the film's based on, Point of Impact, so the honors in the paper go to guest reviewer Scott Eyman. "At bottom," he writes, "Shooter is not ballistic porn so much as a western in urban drag: The retired gunslinger lured out of retirement and promptly double-crossed, who proceeds to clean up the territory anyway, all the while ignoring both legal niceties and - given the amount of blood Swagger seems to lose - natural law. It's a story that can be transplanted from genre to genre, because we never grow tired of it, which is to say that it fits snugly into the paranoid drift of American movies, and the value we place on one honest man with a gun."

"A keyed-up, underwear-model sexy and above all hilarious slice of American badass, Mark Wahlberg is one of the few American actors who can consistently turn a mediocre movie into something momentarily transcendent," writes Akiva Gottlieb for Nerve.

"Jettison the handful of offhand references to current events (like 9/11 and other violent incursions) and you're looking at a screenplay that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis would have climbed all over," suggests Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

"One of those elevated B-pictures that runs type across the bottom of the screen to identify cities, Shooter has its pro forma, paint-by-numbers elements, but it is executed with such efficiency and energy by action maestro Antoine Fuqua that ignoring flaws and becoming involved in the proceedings isn't a matter of choice," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Like most of the earlier conspiracy thrillers, this one proceeds from two warring premises: a synoptic cynicism about the men who run things, and a dewy belief in the myth of the lone hero," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "You're to accept on faith that the high-level perps are both deeply malevolent and supremely competent. (Uh-huh. Then why can't they run a simple Iraq occupation?).... It's too bad that Swagger is a fiction, and that the notion of one man who can right wrongs is less plausible than the conspiracy fears that summoned him up as a solo world police force."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek calls Shooter "a lefty fantasy dolled up in the kinds of thrills and frills a gun-toting right-winger could love."

"Swagger's personal war against genocidal, oil-rich politicos (namely, Ned Beatty's wicked senator) and their paramilitary henchmen (led by Danny Glover's evil so-and-so) contains a pungent whiff of anti-Americanism, with its Iraq and Abu Ghraib references clunkily updating 70s thrillers' Big Brother paranoia," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "However, if a brazen rage against our current administrative machine, Fuqua's film - like 24, it and every other topical thriller's kindred spirit - is also typified by the sort of conservative, lone ranger pro-vigilantism that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a Reagan-era Commando megastar."

John Hiscock opens his interview with Wahlberg for the Telegraph with recollections of The Departed: "They are a volatile couple: Wahlberg, the ex-convict and former street thug from the rough side of Boston, and Scorsese, the outspoken Italian-American former seminary student; and they both had firm ideas of how Wahlberg's scenes should be shot. Unfortunately they were very different."

Updates, 3/24: Dana Stevens in Slate: "Shooter is a video-game-fantasy version of the 2006 midterm elections, a howl of rage at the hypocrisy of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war (not that either is ever mentioned by name)."

"[T]he crushing two-hour-plus running time and Tom Clancy-for-dummies plot sabotage the film, which becomes particularly ridiculous in the last 30 minutes," writes Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle. "By the time Ned Beatty shows up late in the movie as the baddest of the bad guys, the makers of Shooter almost seem to be intentionally going for humor."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "Shooter's a pretty, slick and pretty slick action flick; now and then, it may feel like a steroid-fed MacGyver episode, but when it's moving, it's alive."

Gill Pringle meets Wahlberg for the Independent: "Juvenile delinquent, hit rapper, international model, video director, Hollywood star, fearsome producer... Wahlberg is in no doubt who to thank for such bounty. 'I thank the Lord for all the blessings he's brought upon me,' he announces. 'I readily acknowledge Him as my saviour. I believe that there is a God, and that you will be judged for your actions, which presents problems for someone like me who has been a sinner in the past. I just hope God is a movie fan.'"

Online listening tip. On NPR, Stephen Hunter talks about being on the other end of the reviews.

Updates, 3/26: "[T]his standard industrial product does something strange," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it's angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths."

Variety's Anne Thompson meets Lorenzo di Bonaventura, "the alpha producer on the Paramount lot, with three big movies for 2007: Antoine Fuqua's conspiracy thriller Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg, fresh off his Oscar nom for The Departed; Michael Bay's summer tentpole Transformers, produced in partnership with DreamWorks; and Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, a whimsical fantasy adventure based on the Neil Gaiman novel and starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro."

Posted by dwhudson at March 23, 2007 11:21 AM