Shooter

Mark Wahlberg has made some good choices in his career before Shooter, with his last four films being some of my favourite in recent years such as The Departed (except the last ten minutes), Four Brothers and the hilarious I Heart Huckabees. Unfortunately for us, he made the badly Americanised version of The Italian Job and will be following this up in 2009 with (I'm guessing) a horrible sequel of The Brazilian Job.

As far as this year is concerned, he's starred in two films and Shooter is hopefully the more forgettable of them.

Wahlberg is living in exile is after his commanding officers turn their back on his covert operation in Ethiopia and he loses faith in his career and Danny Glover tracks him down to coax him back into action after learning of a plot to kill the president.

However, the plot is no more than a highly sanctioned ordered double-crossing and Wahlberg finds himself framed for his duties and is forced to go on the run to find who set him up and why.

Also unfortunately for us, the film turns into something akin to a Michael Bay action thriller with more explosions than emptying an entire packet of snap, crackle and pop into your mouth although there are some sweet head shots from a sniper rifle and someone gets their arm blown off after being a cocky bad guy.

This, however, is not enough to save the film and I'm surprised it's got such a high score on IMDB. Save this one for a drunken lads night because you'll need the smokescreen of booze to cover this film being something of a dud.

I would give this film 5.4 double-crosses out of 10