Amy's Robot

Shooter: feel the vibration!

Mark Wahlberg has come a long way since the days of modeling underwear and dedicating his book to his dick. He transitioned from Marky Mark into respectability with Boogie Nights, and really moved into the big time when he started appearing in movies in which he didn't have to take his shirt off at any point, even in Planet of the Apes where it actually would have made sense in the story (the exception being the excellent Rock Star.) Nobody really thought he'd win the Oscar this year for Best Supporting Actor for The Departed, but if he had, it wouldn't have seemed that crazy to see "Academy Award Winner" preceding his name on movie posters for the rest of his life.

Then comes his latest movie, Shooter. This movie really made me wish he had won that Oscar, so that he could follow the post-Academy Award tradition of starring in movies that are totally not what respected actors are supposed to star in (Catwoman, The Reaping.)

Not that Shooter is a bad movie, exactly. It might feature more people getting shot in the head than even the record-setting The Departed, and the whole last hour seems to have been structured with the primary goal of blowing up every single object that ever appears on the screen--cars, helicopters, sheds, gas tanks, houses--in an escalation of explosive DIY vigilante militia warfare. Even all those people's heads seem to combust when shot, which reminds me of the trailer for Hot Fuzz in which Nick Frost asks Simon Pegg "if there is a place in a man's head where if you shoot it, it will blow up."

But even more satisfying than seeing Mark Wahlberg blowing up lots of stuff is the return to the days of long, lingering shots of his mostly naked body, in scenes that are hard to see as cinematically necessary. In Shooter, doing some emergency at-home surgery means you have to take off not only your shirt, but also your pants, with just an artfully placed teeny little hand towel to fill in for his Calvin Kleins. Interestingly, it also means doing a lot of whippets.

We all know he's a talented actor, but it's good to see him getting back to muscle shots and guns. Seems like old times.

categories: Celebrities, Movies
posted by amy at 11:52 PM | #