Feeling like a cross between an 80's-era Stallone or Schwarzenegger flick and Bourne Supremacy-lite, Shooter delivers a straight up, action-revenge film that is easy to get sucked into and hard to resist. As I sat in the theater and watched, I couldn't help but think this is the movie The Marine wanted to be, but that is an entirely different issue. Shooter is based on paranoid conspiracy where they are out to get you.

It is an effective film that plays cinematic shorthand with character identification and gets right down to the action, never wasting a moment on an extraneous subplot. In this regard, this is a successful movie that will keep you interested and not tax your ability to piece together an intricate plot. This is not to say that it is not smartly written — it is — but it is also an action film at its heart, and it delivers.

We are immediately introduced to our hero in the first scene. Mark Wahlberg is Bob Lee Swagger, a name that is more of a way of life (watch Wahlberg walk, it is never without a certain tough guy swagger) for this expert Special Ops sharpshooter. He is with his spotter in Ethiopia, protecting a pathway for a Marine convoy. Things go bad and Swagger and his spotter, also his best friend, are left to fend for themselves. Swagger makes it out alive and shortly thereafter he retires from the Marines and moves off the grid.

Fast forward a few years, and Swagger is visited by Colonel Isaac Johnson, played with a decidedly low-key sense of menace. The visit seems innocuous enough, but there is more than meets the eye. Johnson tells of a suspected attempt to be made on the President's life by an unknown sharpshooter from more than a mile away. Swagger's expertise as a sniper is needed to help ring him down. Swagger doesn't want to help, but if he didn't, where would this movie be? He chooses to help and it turns out to be a setup with Swagger as the fall guy. Now, it is up to our hero to uncover the conspiracy and find out who is behind it and why, plus clear his own name.

All of that is shown in the trailer, and to tell more would probably tell too much. There is not much in the way of subtext. The story is a straight shot from the outset. It does not waste any of its screen time and it never switches stories or introduces characters or plot points that are not absolutely necessary to the outcome of the movie. In a sense, it is a thriller that has been boiled down to its bare essence and then pumped back up with post 9/11 conspiracy theories and paranoid machismo. All of the elements come together to form an entertaining thriller that is good for the moment, but doesn't step into the range of greatness.