Don’t wait to see the whites of their eyes.
After a less than enriching experience as a combat sniper in Ethiopia, Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) retreats to a mountain cabin where he doesn’t have to deal with government types anymore. That is, until a group of government types led by Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover) approach him for his expertise to try to foil a plot to kill the president. Swagger agrees, only for things to go pear-shaped, leaving him and a greenhorn FBI agent (Michael Peña) to put together the broken pieces.
One thing that really stood out to me was the sheer amount of helicopters involved in the production of this film. Not only are there are helicopters flying around searching for/attacking Swagger, but there are a good amount of camera shots taken from inside helicopters as well. If you were to tell me that 50% of this film was filmed from/involved a helicopter, I would be inclined to believe you.
If you’re not a big fan of helicopters, perhaps you’re into ballistics. There’s a good deal of talk about making long shots with full bore rifles taking into account wind speed, target motion, curvature of the Earth, blah blah blah. Blanketing the whole proceedings is a healthy sprinkling of conspiracy theory, and why not? By the end of the film, Swagger just starts gifting messy headshots to anyone he sees, so it’s not like anyone giving it any thought is left taking any of this seriously anyways.
While not aggressively bad in any particular way, anyone choosing to skip this standard action fare can’t be faulted.
