Shooter Reviews
Top Critic
The film's weird, thin politics become harder to swallow as it lurches from set-up to set-up.
This is the first big-studio action picture (the director is Antoine Fuqua) with some of the disgusted, bloody nihilism of the post-Vietnam era.
The engaging, fast-talking idiosyncrasy of [Wahlberg's] performance in The Departed has vanished.
It's one of those conspiracy thrillers that keeps on asking you to take a leap of faith, until you get tired of leaping and you just start laughing in all the wrong places.
Ballistic fetishists and anticorporate activists will find common ground in each violent act against political fat cats, but the rest of us are left to wallow in the bloodlust and wonder who switched the reels.
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| Original Score: 3/6
Shooter is an honorable rather than exceptional addition to the canon.
Despite gripping chase sequences and a few awe-inspiring fiery explosions, gaping holes in the convoluted plot make Shooter heavier on style than substance.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It may not qualify as a masterpiece, yet is a masterful thriller nonetheless.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Though much of the action in Shooter is beautifully photographed, the movie's force is as a blunt instrument of metaphor.
Shooter won't win any Oscars, but it has blood and brains, and even some heart. They're splattered all over the screen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The crushing two-hour-plus running time and Tom Clancy-for-dummies plot sabotage the film, which becomes particularly ridiculous in the last 30 minutes.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Suspended over a deep gully of disbelief, where logic takes more bullets than the bad guys, Shooter still makes the grade as hard-ass action escapism.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A chase movie and a pretty crafty thriller, Shooter owes a lot to Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It features a gritty, macho performance by Mark Wahlberg, stinging political commentary and more 'Here's how you do that' moments than the complete MacGuyver collection on DVD.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Shooter eventually gets in its own way by hitting things too hard, too loud and too long.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Though the movie has some mild pretensions to rank with great paranoia films like Three Days of the Condor, mostly it's content to deliver Salisbury steak-and-mashed-potatoes action.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The plot is so dense and cockamamie, trying to follow it isn't worth the bother.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A high-caliber action movie that gives '70s revenge fantasies a contemporary spin.
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie's politics may miss their mark, but its thrills are dead-on.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Shooter 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.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
A sleek, scattershot and vigorously incoherent vigilante flick that assumes the high ground just long enough to slay every corrupt dirt-ball in its path.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Like most modern action films, Shooter is too explicit, more interested in mayhem than motive.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin have let a perfectly good political action thriller get completely and ridiculously away from them.
Shooter winds up being the movie that would have left us scratching our heads about Wahlberg's choices had he actually won the best supporting actor award for his terrific work in The Departed.
Shooter boasts a likable hero and the possibility of a sequel, and Hollywood rarely asks for a more storybook ending than that.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Director Antoine Fuqua knows how to stage and shoot scenes of violence and chaos so that they build without ever bubbling over into absurdity.
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| Original Score: B
While it's fast-paced and often something of a nail-biter, Shooter doesn't really pay off, other than merely give us a lot of action, merely for action's sake.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Muscles bulge and heads explode in this thoroughly reprehensible, satisfyingly violent entertainment about men and guns and things that go boom.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Its skeptical, disillusioned take on big government and official deceptions should strike a vibrant chord with a wide range of audiences.
Definitely a cut above the average action thriller.
Shooter is far more complicated than it needs to be, taking more crazy twists and turns than it should.
Shooter's covert intent could have been satire. Overtly, though, it's definitely about shooting, betrayal and shooting. In that order.
The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions, including an evil Russian in a wheelchair, a conniving U.S. senator, and a heroine who favors tank tops.
Begins with a semblance of rationality, then flies off the rails, plunging into a series of bloody shootouts and pointless explosions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
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.
For years Wahlberg has been turning into a real actor, and if he ever gets the action hero role he deserves, we'll let you know.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Mark Wahlberg will only get props for balancing out the utter implausibility of [Antoine] Fuqua's new crash-boom conspiracy melodrama Shooter.
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| Original Score: C
The ultimate crime of this paranoid enemy-of-the-state pulp, directed with more style than brains by Antoine Fuqua, is how dull it is.
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| Original Score: C-
Then come the plot holes, the cartoonish performances (especially from Ned Beatty as a crudely drawn, corrupt Montana senator) and -- oh, yes -- the stuff that gets blowed up real good.
Even in a climate where the pervasive influence of 24 can be argued to have caused 'thriller fatigue,' Shooter is worth the price of admission.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
