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| Movie Name: |
Pride |
| Grade: |
C+ |
| Date Posted: |
4/30/07 |
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Shooter
After 30 mind-numbing minutes into “Shooter,” I wanted to punch myself unconscious. But then something odd occurs. Thirty-five minutes in, the clichés stop pounding over our heads; the acting stops causing guffaws; the film becomes a fun, albeit silly action thriller.
Fresh from his Oscar nomination for “The Departed,” Mark Wahlberg stars as Bob Lee Swagger, an ex-military sniper held responsible for a mission that had gone terribly awry. Now retired in the mountains, he’s pulled back in for one last mission by a military ghost (Danny Glover). A presidential assassination attempt is blamed on Swagger and every bureau in the United States places him on their Most Wanted list.
Swagger finds allies in an FBI Agent (Michael Peña, “Crash”) and the widow of his old protégé (Kate Mara, “Brokeback Mountain.”) As Swagger discovers those responsible for setting him up, he seeks cold-blooded revenge.
Act one suffers due to lines like “Some men don't know what to do when their belief systems collapse. Bob Lee is one of those people,” a storyline that not only resembles the hit show “24” but actually steals the first season’s plot, and such atrocious clichés as the protégé pulling out the picture of the girlfriend he misses, only to be blown away seconds later. But nothing can protect audiences from poor Danny Glover. I’m not sure why Glover has a pronounced lisp, whether something happened to the actor or it’s a character choice, but it’s impossible to take a villain seriously when he sounds like Cindy Brady. Between growls, I awaited him skipping down the street, chanting, “Thee thells thee thells by the thee-thore.”
But acts two and three contain some wild wilderness survival tactics, and Peña and Mara, two relatively fresh actors, strongly support Wahlberg. He relaxes around them and quits acting like a deflated Rambo.
A goofy action thriller, “Shooter” survives an atrocious first act, only to persevere against the odds, just like its straight-out-of-the-1980s action hero. Grade: C+
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| Posted by: bouynxdor |
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