Word: swaggeringly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...business. "There's no head to cut off," one of the perps explains. "This is a conglomerate." With a monopoly on state-sponsored (stateside) terrorism, they apparently can kill whomever gets in their way. Toward the end, one of the villains (Rade Sherbedgia) spills the entire conspiracy plot to Swagger because "This is just one dead man talking to another" - and because, otherwise, we wouldn't have a clue to what's going down...
...opposition is just one person: the Erin Brockovich of decommed soldiers, a Rambo with a higher IQ - Bob Lee Swagger! With a surname redolent of American machismo, and Christian names that suggest both Good Ol' Boy and President Assassination Suspect, Swagger is your standard-issue outlaw hero. He loves his pet pooch, has little use for humans. On being offered the assignment to prevent an assassination, he spits out his apolitical nihilism: "I don't much like this President. Didn't like the last one much either." (As a non-voter for either Bush or Clinton, he's in sync...
...start, Swagger, still on active duty, is perched on a hilltop in Ethiopia - "a country we're not supposed to be in" - on assignment to shoot down some enemy soldiers. The movie has established its fidelity to the war and cop genres in this first scene, when Swagger's spotter, a nice kid, mentions he can't wait to see his girlfriend back home and is promptly killed. That information also gives Swagger a rare ally (pretty, stalwart Kate Mara, who played Heath Ledger's daughter in Brokeback Mountain) once he's on the run from Washington, D.C., to Tennessee...
...Fuqua, who directed Training Day and King Arthur, knows his male audience, and knows that they like how-to movies on survival against all odds. So he spends plenty of screen time showing Swagger at work: cauterizing his own bullet wound, driving backward off a bridge into a river, planting napalm (a nice Vietnam touch) in an enemy compound. Indeed, the film is best at giving instructions in the assembling and detonation of weapons of movie distraction. And Wahlberg, so muscled up he looks as if he's ready to explode, is serious and committed to the genre. We happen...
...Toward the end, Swagger gets a civics lesson from a venal Montana Senator (Ned Beatty): "There's always a confused soul who thinks that one man can make a difference.... That's the problem with democracy." Actually, no. The problem with democracy is thinking that all men can make a difference. One man: that's despotism, or comic-book wish-fulfillment. Or the premise of nearly every Hollywood movie, which says that the system is corrupt, and the little guy can beat it. (Until the next movie, where the system is corrupt...