Friday Movie Reviews (Vol. 4)

So this week's flick is what could be a the start of a lucrative franchise. (Sorry there wasn't more, but it has been a busy week.)

So Sunday night after returning from the middle school retreat, I decided to catch a movie before heading home to crash hard. So I knocked a film off the list I have been wanting to see and just haven't had the time: Shooter.

Now, here is the truth, Shooter is a decent action movie that I can definitely see becoming a franchise along the lines of Die Hard for Mark Wahlberg. It has the pieces there: a loner who loves America but hates the system, action sequences, crazy sniper shots (man, I need to dust off my copy of Halo 2) and more. But the movie does suffer from some bad directing and one really bad performance.

For starters, the movie's set-up is good. A sniper who quits after being abandoned by the country on an operation that kills his friend and spotter. Three years later, he is asked to evaluate a sniper scenario and gets implicated in a failed assassination attempt on the President. From there it turns into your typical man-on-the-run movie, where he picks up help, a sidekick, etc. And a lot of the movie seemed to be throwing action scenes upon action scene just because there is a budget for it, without doing much for the plot. But Wahlberg is believable as a hero and I could see this becoming a franchise, especially because the novel it is based on has several others books that follow it.

What was bad: Kate Mara. Like, I generally don't write and call-out people for being terrible in movies, but Mara is horrendous in this film. Admittedly, it is your typical damsel in distress role, but her bad acting and fake southern accent made me cringe nearly every moment she was on screen. It just was really, really badly done, and exploitative. (That isn't to say she is simply a terrible actress. I felt her work in We are Marshall was pretty good.)

On the whole, Shooter is a "wait for the DVD" or when it makes the jump to heavy rotation on USA or TBS.