sniper Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The strike isn't the only thing that has been cooking up lately. Check out all the international indie deals that Variety threw up recently:

• Oldboy helmer Park Chan-Wook has not only been cooking up some machine love with I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. He's also got Bakjwi (Evil Live) on the way -- a modern-day bloodsucking vampire story, and Variety reports that CJ Entertainment has pre-sold French and Russian rights to the pic, which hopefully means North America will get some bloody rights soon. Other current CJ deals include Secret Sunshine, Shadows in the Palace, and Love Now.
• On the more Bolly side of things, Variety has posted that India indie distributor Indo-Overseas Films has picked up some movie rights. First up is the romcom Chocolate, directed by Mayavi helmer Shafi, and written by Sachi and Sethu. Ah, the ease of one-word, short names! The other film that Indo-Overseas has nabbed is Power Kids, but that currently seems to be lurking beyond the reach of the Internet.
• There's also a few action flicks coming out of Hong Kong. Variety reports that Rialto has gotten Aussie and Kiwi rights to both award-winner Dante Lam's upcoming flick Sniper, and Assassins -- Soi Cheang's latest action film. I don't know Cantonese, but maybe one of you, out there, can tell me if that's the same as The Grudge detective Ryo Ishibashi's Shamo? The flicks are also reaching Israel, the ex-Yugoslavian region, and Turkey, so maybe, again, we'll hear North American rights soon.

There's an appeal to the sniper's art -- the snick and snap of each hand-pulled bolt, the blue-steel poetry of it. Each cycle of the firing mechanism is as brief and constrained as a haiku, one that says the same thing over and over again: Die. Based on the novel by thriller writer and film critic Stephen Hunter (The Day Before Midnight, Pale Horse Coming), Shooter is an attempt to capture the essence of the sniper -- that most existential yet intimate of murders, where you shoot from a distance, killing one by one. Mark Wahlberg plays Bob Lee Swagger; when we meet Bob Lee, he's with Marine Force Recon, loaned out to shady suit-clad types in the name of some greater good. When Bob Lee's spotter Donnie (Lane Garrison) pulls a picture out of his fiancée out of his spotter's notebook, we sigh -- might as well be a boat called the Live Forever -- but we kind of accept that scenes like this are a necessary preamble in a certain kind of thriller, the overture before the curtain goes up.

Fade to black, and a title card tells us it is 36 months later, and Bob Lee is living in the woods with a tragic past, and an even more tragic ponytail. Men are looking for Bob Lee -- men with work to do. Led by Danny Glover, they explain that intercepted communiqués indicate someone will try to kill the President from a mile out with a single shot during scheduled appearances in our nation's capital, or Baltimore or Philadelphia. Not many people in the world could make that shot -- but Bob Lee could, so they want him to tell them where to look for the would-be assassin. He's an expert. He's a patriot. He's a patsy.

Swiftly and aggressively entertaining at its best moments, thoroughly (aggressively) boring at its worst, the new action flick Shooter feels like it fell right out of the 1980s. Jettison the handful of offhand references to current events (like 9/11 and other violent incursions) and you're looking at a screenplay that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis would have climbed all over. When director Antoine Fuqua keeps his lenses focused firmly on the action, Shooter is quite a bit of tough, gritty fun. It's just that all the endless story deviations and lethargic plot contortions start to grate on the nerves after a little while.

Based on the novel Point of Impact (by Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter), Shooter is a blend of The Fugitive and In the Line of Fire -- with one amusingly outrageous portion of Cliffhanger thrown in because, hey, blood looks really cool when it's splattered all over virgin snow. Our hero is Bob Lee Swagger (as played by Mark Wahlberg and yes I said Swagger), the undisputed world's champ when it comes to killing enemies by way of military sniper rifle. Think you've got mad Halo skills when you find that sniper gun? Please. Bob Lee Swagger can hit a tin can from over a mile away -- and pet his dog at the same time. So when a shadowy government man (Danny Glover) shows up at Swagger's isolated cabin with his evil henchman (Elias Koteas) in tow, you'd think Bob Lee would know better than to accept their proposal -- to "fake" a presidential assassination in order to help "prevent" a presidential assassination -- but he doesn't.