'Shooter' Hits Its Mark With an Old-Fashioned Hero

"Shooter" is the kind of movie where an establishing shot of the Capitol dome is accompanied by a teletype on the bottom of the screen informing us that we are, indeed, in Washington, D.C.

There are, in fact, many of those laboriously irrelevant teletyped place settings in the picture, whose settings range from Ethiopia to Montana, but which actually takes place entirely in Movieland.

"Shooter," based on the novel "Point of Impact" by Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, posits Mark Wahlberg as sniper Bob Lee Swagger, who begins the picture enmeshed in a military cock-up in Ethiopia. Three years later, nicely retired to the Western woods with his dog in a rustic lodge that indicates a considerable independent income above and beyond a military pension, Swagger is called back into active duty to investigate the most likely spot for an assassination plot against the president.

It turns out to be a setup, during which an Ethiopian archbishop is assassinated instead of the president. Why would anybody want to assassinate an Ethiopian archbishop? Therein lies our tale. A wounded Swagger, on the run without friends or armaments, is tagged as the assassin, and he struggles to survive despite the best efforts of the FBI and the requisite shadowy state cabals that current events tell us are as much documentary fact as fictional convenience.

Of course, they kill his dog, so he doesn't lack for motivation.

Antoine Fuqua made a genuinely good movie once called "Training Day," but at this point that can safely be ascribed to a good script and Denzel Washington's electrically demonic performance. Most of Fuqua's other pictures tend toward the generic, and he seems content to occupy the slot marked "working director," bare millimeters above the slot marked "hack."

But Fuqua always moves things along, and there are some crackerjack scenes in "Shooter," notably one with an aged backwoods gun expert (Levon Helm) who functions as Swagger's version of Yoda. These scenes work as well as they do because they work against the go-go strain of the generic thriller, with its requisite plethora of head-shots and severed limbs, at which Fuqua is all too expert.

Despite the title, the movie doesn't fetishize the hardware, i.e. the guns. Wahlberg has a speech or two about wind velocity and the curvature of the Earth and various other issues that can throw a 2,000-yard shot off-target, but he throws them away in an underplayed monotone.

The movie is really about the omnipotence of the hero, as most of the narrative plays Swagger as a less bulked-up version of John Rambo, from his survival skills and ability to withstand pain, to the mortification of the flesh and spirit he is forced to endure.

This movie being a product of the new, green Hollywood, which has undoubtedly banned steroids along with tobacco, Wahlberg's body -- which is on fairly generous display -- seems to be the product only of reasonable amounts of weight training. Wahlberg is an interesting case, passing as he has from boy band heartthrob to what seems to be premature early middle age (he's 35) without an intervening period of maturity. There have been times when Wahlberg has been hopelessly out to sea -- "Planet of the Apes," not that it was his fault -- but he's developed into an actor with a nice line in peremptory masculinity, although I do miss the dim sweetness he displayed in "Boogie Nights."

The rest of the cast members are all high-end pros: Ned Beatty plays yet another mendacious corrupt politico, and he has a couple of good speeches that nicely walk a tightrope between red-state realpolitik and blue state viewpoints about the Iraq war. Danny Glover plays against his usually upstanding type, and the young actress Kate Mara brings something fresh and authentic to a typically underwritten part.

At bottom, "Shooter" is not ballistic porn so much as a western in urban drag: The retired gunslinger lured out of retirement and promptly double-crossed, who proceeds to clean up the territory anyway, all the while ignoring both legal niceties and -- given the amount of blood Swagger seems to lose -- natural law.

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.

Shooter (126 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for graphic violence and some profanity.