hooter, which marks a muscular return for director Antoine Fuqua after his Training Day, is a fun but scattered conspiracy thriller about a plan to assassinate the president of the United States. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and adapted to the screen by Red Planet’s Jonathan Lemkin, Shooter is really a shoot-'em-up, but with military snipers and government conspiracies.

We start off in Africa with retired and implausibly named ex-Marine Corps sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) and his friend (Donnie Fenn from Prison Break) stationed on a peace-keeping mission; things go horribly awry; the friend dies in action and Swagger ends up single-handedly taking on a small army.

Fast-forward three years and the picture's lonesome hero is living alone in a cabin in the Wyoming woods with not much more than a collection of awesome weaponry and a copy of the 9/11 Commission report on his desk. He trusts no one, except perhaps his beloved dog.

Eventually, he is visited by a military officer (Danny Glover) with one final assignment: an alleged peace-keeping mission to prevent a potential assassination. Swagger, a bona fide sharpshooter, is reluctantly lured back into service from his isolation as the shadowy government operative pushes Swagger's super-patriot button, claiming that the U.S. intelligence needs his expertise to scout out locations for a sniper’s nest and to prevent the hit.