HOW can you tell if an American film has political pretentions these days? Well, if images appear on the screen when light is shone through the celluloid, you can be pretty certain the film-makers are trying to say something about Bush and his follies.
Shooter, a glum, overlong thriller starring a worried Mark Wahlberg, certainly believes itself to be a polemical beast, but of what stripe we are never quite sure. Telling the story of an attempt to frame a blameless veteran for a political assassination, the picture is densely populated with the sort of shadowy government goons that men in sandals believe rule America. Abu Ghraib and WMD's are snorted about as the film puffs up its cheeks with simmering rage at American imperialism. A missive from the left then? Not quite, I think.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the man behind Training Day, Shooter begins by explaining how Wahlberg's Bob Lee Swagger, a marksman with the US special services, was betrayed by his superiors while operating in some dusty part of the world. Annoyed and suspicious, Swagger retires to a retreat in the hills and sets about growing a beard while marinating his psyche in paranoia.
One day the secret service comes calling with a job offer: help us guard against people as crafty as you by devising a hypothetical plan to assassinate the president. Bob grumpily agrees and is soon leaving evidence of his researches all over the place. You can probably imagine what develops.
Despite its hostility towards the perennially malevolent Them, the film is infused as much with that very American school of libertarianism as it is with any coherent left-wing sensibility. While hiding away in the back- woods among his guns and his suspicions, Bob Lee - granted incongruous teenage sweetness by Wahlberg - comes across more like a sinister survivalist than any budding Walt Whitman. Guns are bad. But guns do good. The more Shooter progresses, the more diffuse its political message becomes.
More seriously for a multiplex audience, the tense set-up of the first act, which calls to mind similar events in Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View, rapidly gives way to a slack mass of improbabilities that eventually betrays the earlier inclination toward angry pessimism. Nothing much here to excite you - or worry Them.
