Wahlberg, the ‘thinking-man’s action hero’ is chin deep in trouble as Bob Swagger, a former military sharp-shooter brought in to defend the President. A failed assassination attempt makes him the fall-guy for a job with connections from Ethiopia to the White House. We’re deep in the territory of Tony Enemy of the State Scott as imagined by Antoine King Arthur Fuqua (Foo-kwa) whose cluttered approach to the action genre is about as convincing as Spike Lee remaking Top Gun. And so, with Swagger on the run from corrupted government officials led by lisping Danny Glover, Fuqua has only to check the boxes enroute to an explosive finale.

“This is about to get worse” says Glover, though it’s hard to imagine how. Shooter wants to be a film of courage. Swagger is a man of few words and, quite reasonably for a persecuted sniper, is mostly concerned with in and out. He is both – in for his country and out of step with his government. “Let’s see what sort of lies they’re trying to sell us today,” he says in the film’s only interesting angle, a strident assault on a scandalously unapologetic government meddling in international affairs. As a lone saviour, anti-hero Swagger warms to this theme on many occasions, though usually just before the mass slaughter of FBI agents which really doesn’t help his case. How should we feel when innocents are effortlessly slain by the good guy who by any turn of a moral compass, is proving himself the bad guy.

Yet strangely these narcoleptic lapses of internal logic serve in the film’s favour. As overblown, unfeasible and preposterous as most of this is, and most of it is utterly preposterous, embrace the absurdity of Wahlberg’s world and Shooter scores a bulls-eye of sorts. It’s silly, it’s a spectacle but it’s fun, if you want it to be. Yet a couragous, thinking-man’s action film it is certainly not.

// COLIN FRASER