The Shooter

The sniper movie based on Stephen Hunters Bob Lee Swagger book "Point of Impact" opens today. I'm a weekend-matinee-going kind of movie viewer, so I won't be in the theater Friday. And I have an IPSC match on Saturday, which means I'll be in the 9th Street Theater Sunday afternoon waiting to see how much of the original story remains in the movie.

Fish sent me a couple of links yesterday to early critiques of the movie which were not universally complementary.

The gist seems to be that the movie stays fairly close to the book in the better (early) half of the movie, but loses all continuity in the finale. Big surprise, huh?

In the source book, Swagger is a Viet Nam Marine Sniper. The book was written in the early 1990's, so by 2007 that made Swagger a middle-aged hero who may have become too old a dog to hunt.

Put another 15-20 years on our hero, and he's going to end up looking something like ... me. (Check the profile picture. Not an awe inspring profile eh?) So the first change has Bob Lee a veteran of a Middle-Eastern conflict, which takes the worst of 30 years off his age and makes Marky Mark a reasonable choice to play Swagger.

From that point on, the story is updated to fit the recent American history in a manner reminiscent of the swings of a pendulum which can't stay out of the way of directorial boosts.

By the end of the movie, the director has so lost track of the original story that he has to bend over and squat out an ending. No, I haven't seen the movie and I'm not prescient, but I've seen what Hollywood does to books and it isn't always a pretty sight. Have I mentioned the similarity between Hollywood treatments of 'action' books and sausage making?

I'm not so old and cranky that I'll boycot this movie just because some ex-L.A. Street Tagger can't get the ending right. I expect it to fall apart eventually, but the good news from the pre-release critical reviews I've read is they hold it together until right at the very end.

It's okay. I know how the story really ends (SWMBO and I reread "Point of Impact" within the past two weeks), and anybody who does even a fair job of paying homage to Hunter's plot is doing okay.

I just hope they don't lose the big scene at the Baptist Church. Oh, and is it too much to hope that they get Swagger's revenge on Payne at the end?

Watch this space.