Shooting blanks

In the '90s there was this craze for what I thought of as straight-to-video big-screen movies. They weren't good enough for the big screen, yet somehow made it. Seagal, Van Damme, Stallone and the Governator all made one of those movies at some point (some never made it past those).\nWelcome Mark Wahlberg to that pantheon. Wahlberg plays a Marine gunnery sergeant named Bob Lee Swagger, who becomes framed for an attempted assassination on the president and then goes on a vendetta of "kick ass" to clear his name. Michael Peña of "World Trade Center" fame plays the FBI agent who believes he's innocent, while Danny Glover plays a colonel of -- wait for it -- a "shadowy organization" that "decides what the world needs" to fix its problems, even if those decisions require some wet work.\nThis movie was typical of a lot of those '90s movies, with seedy second-rate actors playing the "henchmen," the typical "main character ends up running into the widow of the best friend who was killed because he is injured and needs help" (she somehow has medical training, as usual), and the climactic "main character walks toward audience while walking away from really big Hollywood explosion." What made this movie different was that it was actually pretty good. \nThe acting is much better than I expected. Marky Mark is one of those rare rapper-turned-actors who can actually act. Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") made the movie a little deeper than its genre usually follows, with a better plot twist at the end. We're not talking a "Sixth Sense"-style plot twist but enough to show the movie was thought out. It also had limited use of cheesy one-liners. Of course, being a movie about an American soldier and shadowy organizations, there are elements of politics relevant to today, such as Africa, Iraq, etc. While these "ideals" are laid out pretty blatantly, they don't detract from the story too much.\nAll in all, "Shooter" was not a horrible movie. Wahlberg fans will probably enjoy it, but this one is probably better as a rental than anything else. If it's anything like its predecessors, it will be in the $5 bin within a year of its DVD release.