Shooter & Bourne Ultimatum

(spoilers for both movies)

I watched Shooter first, and thought at the time it was Mark Wahlberg's go at a Bourne Identity Identity type of movie: a highly trained super-competent military type ends up being hunted by the US government at the instigation of rogue elements within it. There's a mix of nominally good to just-following-orders to evil in the government agents. There's kind of a gritty realism that sets them apart from James Bond, although some over-the-top crashes and fights still occur and are survived.

Shooter isn't nearly as compelling as the Bourne movies. The protagonist doesn't have amnesia, but also doesn't seem to have a past beyond having been in a fictional military intervention in Africa a couple years previous. There's lots of interesting sniper talk to make things interesting. The ranch shoot-out is pretty good, but it underlines the main failing of the movie- Wahlberg doesn't ever get that close to being defeated- he's almost always in control except early on in the movie after being shot by a cop. There's a few deleted scenes with some stuff about the Iraq War, and the vaguest intimation that 9/11 was allowed by the US government ("nothing that bad happens without the permission of the government").

The ending is pretty poorly done, I think a darker ending would have been more effective. Instead, we get the Attorney General telling Wahlberg that in order to protect the institutions that make America great you have to sometimes just go and kill Bad People on your own. Never mind that the institutions you are trying to protect are the ones that enshrine due process and the rule of law and so forth, and that the Bad People who need killing are mainly at fault because they took the law into their own hands and decided they could kill a few people for their however perverted notion of the good of the nation. Contrast that with the much more procedural ending (but equally unsatisfying) of Bourne Ultimatum.

In the Bourne Ultimatum, there are times when it would do the movie good to have Bourne screw up a few times instead of always executing perfectly. Except when he comes up against the 'minibosses' that are the enemy 'assets' or assassins sent to kill him, then it's more satisfying to see him get beat up a little and just barely survive. The two car crashes Bourne just crawls out of seemed a little too unrealistic- by virtue of shooting an innocent man and being submerged underwater is the reason he survives? The shooting scene flashback reminds me of Blood Diamonds and the initiation of the African child soldiers who are forced to shoot another child.

It's not clear why he calls the villain CIA boss at the end to reveal that he's stolen the contents of his safe- perhaps to encourage him to incriminate himself further? But the main result is that the female CIA agent is put into danger and Bourne himself comes closer to being killed.

I need to watch the first two again to see how they compare.