I caught this last night at the dollar theatre. It was like Red Dawn and Rambo meet Fahrenheit 911 and MacGyver. I loved it. It was my kind of fun action flick.Check it out if you get the chance. Here’s a blurb from a review by the Village Voice.
cd
Wittily adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin (The Devil’s Advocate) from the first in a trilogy of Swagger novels by Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, 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. Betrayed by Uncle Sam both at home and abroad, Swagger starts to seem like the last honest exponent of old-fashioned American virtue—a John Rambo for the Bush II generation—and the more he learns about the conspiracy that has taken hold of his life, the further he sees that it reaches: that everything really is about oil money and that, in the words of the movie’s fat-cat red-state senator (a wonderfully smarmy Ned Beatty), there are no heroes and villains or Democrats and Republicans—only haves and have-nots. Cannily programmed at the start of the 2008 election season, this rampantly amoral and Darwinian film persuasively argues that, in today’s America, it’s every man for himself and commerce against all. Allow me to be the first to propose: Bob Lee Swagger for president.
