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.

This all puts him in the right place at the wrong time when an assassination occurs; Swagger is set up as the fall guy for a different killing. By the time his eyes are opened, he's been wounded, framed and must fight his way to clearance with an entertaining abundance of desperate maneuvers, outfitted with contempo action techno gear and military camouflage.

He eventually enlists the sympathy of rookie FBI agent Nick Memphis (“Crash’s” Michael Peña) by convincing him that he just might be the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. He also gets much needed-help from Sarah Fenn (Kate Mara, who played Heath Ledger's daughter in Brokeback Mountain), the widow of his Marine buddy who was sacrificed on the Ethiopian mission. She manages to appear in her lingerie in every scene, of course.