Jenn and I watched the Mark Wahlberg movie Shooter last night. Overall rating: Suckage.
We are glad that we didn’t pay full theater price to see this one. It was chock full of holes in the plot and the acting. The only good thing that can be said about the movie are the settings and the cinematography. The director did an excellent job shifting settings from (apparently) Eritrea to the Rockies to Philadelphia to Kentucky to Virginia and back to the Rockies. But don’t see the movie for that reason. You’ll regret it.
One other thing that the movie makers spent a lot of time on was realistic (I assume) blood and brain spatters after being head-shot by a rifle. The movie, after all, is about a marine sniper who is good at shooting people from a long way away. (spoilers ahoy, if you care)
Oh, but the flaws! The whole plot revolves around a conspiratorial conglomerate of high-powered people in the U.S. who are above the law. In order to further their ends, the convince Bob (Wahlberg) to come out of retirement in order to advise on the likely location of a potential other sniper. What they are really doing is milking him for information in order to line up their shot, then they plan to blame it on him. The crazy thing was that they got all of the information from his under-breath muttering. “You have to account for humidity, pressure, even the coriolis effect…” This all sounds good when you say it, but it still takes that Force Recon trained sniper behind the gunsight to actually pull it off. In this movie, the gun was fired by remote. I doubt it…
Another HUGE flaw was that in order to blame Bob for the shooting, they stole his rifle to place at the scene, plus they dug a bullet out a mountainside (that he had fired at a can of food for practice) to use in the actual shooting, so the bullet would match Bob’s rifle. I find it hard to understand that a bullet fired through a tin can and into the ground could be used a second time for an accurate shot. Blah.
Also, if any of the reading I do is even close to accurate, snipers are trained to go for sure hits, which in a lot of cases means center mass and the associated organs like hearts and lungs. This is especially true in hurried situations where targets are moving (if anyone wants to correct me on these points, feel free). In the movie, however, Mr. Bob almost exclusively shot people in the head. Damn was he good.
Of course, there were many many many other things that had Jenn and I staring at each other wondering why we kept watching. The love interest’s primary role in the movie was to have big tits and a flat belly. The government’s role was to be powerless and venal. And, they shot Bob’s dog (off camera).
Blah, blah, and double blah. Total suckage and I don’t recommend the movie to anyone.
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