Shooter is the kind of movie asks that audience to accept as a bad guy a corrupt senator who laughs and says things like "They actually think America is a democracy!" It is a completely implausible and ridiculous, a two hour episode of MacGyver without the mullet fun.
Of course, every thriller, even the very best (Seven, The Silence of the Lambs) is implausible if you really think about it. But in a good thriller, the director is able to make everything so compelling that you don't really notice the plot problems. In Shooter, however, Antoine Fuqua (who must have been made fun of in school over his last name) apparently decided to lower everything so that the dumbest person in the audience could understand exactly what is going on at all times.
There are great many surprises in the film, and anyone who has not seen the trailer or will not be able to guess them (I.E. tenth graders and under) should stop reading now. For those who must know, Mark (insert your own joke here) Wahlberg stars as Bob Lee Swagger, a right wing military guy who lives in a cabin on a mountain. He's visited by a lisped government agent (Danny Glover) who recruits him because intelligence has reported an assassination attempted on the President is imminent. They have no leads as to who the killer is, but they do know that he will attempt to take the shot from a mile away, something very marksmen are capable of. They want Swagger to plan an assassination himself, hoping that minds will think a like. Unfortunately, the whole plan is really just an attempt to really assassinate the President (or so it seems) and blame it on Swagger. The rest of the film recounts Swagger's increasingly implausible escape from a nation wide manhunt while an FBI agent (Michael Pena in a part that is inexplicably not played by Denzel Washington) slowly begins to suspect a conspiracy. There is even an obligatory love story with a woman who looks a lot like Jessica Simpson.
This is the sort of the sort of movie that Snakes on a Plane was made to parody. It was fun to hear the obvious dialogue and see Wahlberg's Mel Gibson-like pain endurance (as well as some scenes of stuff blowing up) but it's not enough to ward off the movie's eventual tedium. But I do give it his much: the movie is funny, a lot more than most bad thrillers, which are just boring. But is it funny enough to warrant an "unintentional" positive review? Nah.
Shooter (2007)