Short Review: What’s better than corporate suck-up millionaires making movies about the evils of corporate suck-up billionaires.


This film, based on Stephen Hunter’s book Point of Impact, tells the tale of Bob Lee Swagger, a disillusioned Marine sniper who is framed for the attempted assassination of the President of the United States. Swagger uncovers what amounts to a secret government that is running things behind the scenes. The cranky sniper then, of course, goes Rambo on everyone at one thousand paces.

This film is both tedious and inflammatory. Sound impossible to be both at the same time? All you need to do is take a poorly written script and litter it with the most ignorant and hysterical anti-neoconservative rants possible. This film is infused with an obscene amount of thoughtless leftist trash talk. The 9/11 commission is referred to as lies, it is clearly stated that our government knew about 9/11 beforehand, and Abu-Ghraib is cited as a part of an overall government conspiracy. Abu Ghraib is spoken of in this film like it was the Holocaust. Soldiers, contractors, missionaries and journalists are getting their throats slit by Islamo-fascists and these dimwits consider Abu Ghraib to be the great evil of our time? 9/11 conspiracy garbage is dragged out and treated like it is serious.

Attention leftist idiots, 9/11 wasn’t a government conspiracy. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. We have twenty years of Islamic terrorist attacks that preceded the event. If Bush Co. was behind 9/11 then they would have to be behind the dozens of attacks worldwide going back to the 1970’s.

Morons.

The insult to injury with this leftist crud is that it isn’t even clever leftist crud (see The Motorcycle Diaries for example for well done leftist crud). Get this; a rookie FBI guy investigates the attempted assassination. He leaves the FBI because they’re too burdensome. He then immediately begins sporting a Che Guevera t-shirt of all things – you know, like most young FBI agents would do. This guy is a FBI agent, not some undergrad chimp trying to piss off his parents. Speaking of corrupt Latin thugs, Danny Glover took a break from spooning with Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez to make this little ditty. It’s nice that ol’ Danny can put off his love-in with Hugo long enough to make this anti-American heap.

The insult on top of the insult that is on top of the injury is how the film ends – and I’m going to give away the ending here - condoning the assassination of our leaders. Quite literally the film come out on the side of killing the corrupt instead of working through the channels of justice. Apparently, these folks are so powerful they cannot be brought down by normal means. Ask Clinton about that. I’m sure that if a sullied blue dress can almost wipe out a Democratic President anyone can be brought down to size. Needless to say, the main villain is yet another Dick Cheney clone (also see The Day After Tomorrow, American Dreamz, etc.) By extension, this film promotes assassinating the Vice President.

Nice.

Oh, the film itself? Like I said, it’s tedious. The piece is paint-by-numbers. There are no real surprises and the dialog is stale. There are some interesting technical points about being a sniper but these points can be culled from the Hunter’s book which is far superior.

Obviously my cold, politically conservative heart doesn’t recommend this film. Looking past my political interests, this is still a stock piece not worth the effort of renting. Any portion of the film that is valuable is overshadowed by the agenda that hangs over this piece. It’s too bad, Mark Wahlberg is effective as Swagger. A reasonably good performance gone to waste.


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Invincible (2006)
Four Brothers (2005)

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Labels: Danny Glover, film, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Pena, movie review