As winter ebbs into spring, so too do a young man’s fancies turn from horror movies to action movies. (Okay, that’s just not true, I could watch a new horror movie every day and, save for the effort of reviewing everything, not get tired of it. But that is kind of the cycle that Hollywood thrusts upon us on average, and so here we are.) Anyway, the first action movie of the season that I’ve noticed is Shooter, in which Mark Wahlberg [SPOILER ALERT!!!] shoots people. See? Totally an action movie.

Of course, I was nearly derailed right at the beginning, when our hero’s military partner was named Donnie. But I recovered from that bit of amusement (luckily, there were no Dirks) and settled into a pretty engrossing action drama. See, this sniper guy has retired from the military because of a difference of opinion between him and a commanding officer about whether he should have been left behind without support during an illegal incursion into another country. (He was against it, you see.) So now that he’s living the quiet isolationist mountain lifestyle with a lot of guns and a dog and no human contact, Danny Glover decides that he actually has gotten too old for this shit, and it’s time to contract out saving the President’s life to someone else. See, some other awesome sniper is about to assassinate our gunnery seargent’s estranged commander in chief, and only an equally awesome sniper can figure out how he’ll do it, so they can stop him. Except, Danny was always lying about that age thing, and is instead a bad guy setting up someone to take the fall after the assassination. Luckily, Marky Mark somehow manages to survive the first fifteen minutes and then enlists the help of a hot red-headed chick and an idealistic FBI agent to trace down the conspiracy and get his life back.

Except, he finds out that it goes All The Way To The Top! (No, not really. The President is not targetting himself. I promise.) Anyway, there’s lots of fugitive-y stuff, a fair amount of wargames and shooting, the occasional sniping, a helicopter explosion worthy of having been accomplished by James Bond, and also cool conspiracy elements like I mentioned previously. My only complaint is that I liked the dark ambiguous ending to the film that occurred about seven minutes before the actual ending better than the one that preceded the credits. But the explosion and the hot redhead make up for that, so.