The Marksman (2005)

Wesley Snipes has had tax issues for years, so he's gone down the route of Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, Jean Claude Van Damme, among others. That doesn't excuse how abominably bad this movie is. It's just over 90 minutes long, and it feels like well over two hours with how excruciatingly laborious it is. It has stock footage from the movie Navy Seals, Iron Eagle, among other things, and no action to speak of, aside from extremely boring shootouts. I don't know how much this cost to make, but it's really cheap looking, and filmed in Romania. I feel so bad for Wesley Snipes, because he is such a talented action star. He is very adept at martial arts, and is quite charismatic. He has barely any lines here, and phones it in. I don't blame him one bit. He's clearly trying to make some quick cash, but he looks bored to tears. He even appears dubbed on a couple occasions. They try to give him this mysterious character, and it fails miserably. He does no fighting here, so even die hard Snipes fans will be disenchanted. I admittedly lost focus on a number of occasions here. It really is that boring. It has many scenes, filled with uninteresting & poor dialog, which seem to go on forever. It's too boring to be so bad it's good, the action is mostly gunfire. Snipes had barely any dialog. It fails on every level. If you wanna see Snipes at his best, check out Demolition Man, or a Blade movie. This movie belongs in bargain bins, and it'll make you weep about how Snipes has succumbed his standards to this drivelDUD

Well the problem with this movie is there is obvious flaws that are just too obvious for the general public.First my DVD box said it had multiple languages and subtitles, when it had only English with no subtitles... I tough at first they could had mix the DVDs but it seem i was not the only one. So i watched it in English and could experience the awful dubbing of some of the rangers army team(especially the captain). This alone make it seem like awful acting.Wesley is really soft spoken, maybe a bit too much for your obvious action movie fan... The gun sounds also seem a bit off, they don't have that noisy noises(even when silencers) that we are used to hear in movies.Hand to hand combat for what there is seem extremely cheap and bad too(but its very limited to only a few scenes) The plot is like the general 90s action movie type, i will not get into detail but i will say its very simple, and the villains are very under used all movie long.But despise all of these flaws, as an action movie, without being "very good", it ain't as horrible as some people wanted it to be. The production just seem too cheap, thats the main problem, cause the rest, its done decently for an action movie with gunfights, an OK story, and a military theme. In any case i will never say it was a good action movie, but its certainly not as bad as some people want to put it...

The Marksman starts as a high level Government meeting is held in Washington DC, some bloke named John (William Hope) & his assistant Amanda (Emma Samms) tell the top brass about Russian bad guy General Egor Zaysan (Dan Badarau) who has recruited a load of Chechen rebels to seize control of a nuclear power planet. It's claimed Zaysan plans to re-core one of the reactors to create a huge nuclear bomb & that cannot be allowed to happened, the US must act & with several American scientists held as hostages there is only one man for the job, marine Painter (Wesley Snipes) who has to planet a homing device on the uncored nuclear reactor to set up a precise missile strike. Can he do it? The fate of tens of thousands of lives rests in his hands but just as Painter thinks the job is done he discovers that he & his team were betrayed & set-up & it's up to him to put things right...Directed by Marcus Adams this is yet another straight-to-video action film from Sony Pictures shot in Eastern Europe featuring a one time Hollywood action star, in this particular case it's Wesley Snipes. Everything about The Marksman is slow & lethargic, I must admit that it's not the worst low budget action film out there but it largely forgettable. The plot about some mad Russian General wanting to use a nuclear power plant as a huge bomb is something more suited to a Bond film & is a half way decent plot but as I said it's all so slow & forgettable, there are numerous bits where people in suits talk shadowy conspiracies that don't really go anywhere & have little dramatic impact because of the way these revelations & supposed twists are just dropped into the film with nothing to back them up. The whole idea of the elaborate set-up & the reasons behind it are reasonably good & quite ambitious for a film such as this but the script doesn't handle things properly with major revelations just tossed in there with no regard to dramatic impact & the low budget doesn't help either. The character's are all walking clichés, there's the hard nosed but fair Captain, the one man army, the one who has all the one-liners & swears a lot & when the chips are down a heroic one. Snipes character puzzles me, sure he has a troubled past & all that but he barely has any dialogue at all in this, in fact I doubt he has more than five or six lines throughout the entire thing & comes across as pretty uninterested in the whole affair. Also the first fifty or so minutes of The marksman are really slow going, virtually nothing happens apart from US soldiers wandering around at night & it's not until the end when the action kicks in by which time I am sure many will have switched off.The only thing anyone really needs to know is how good is the action? Well it's not brilliant but it's alright, there's a tank which drives through a wall & little else, there are a few explosions, there's a shoot-out or two & surprisingly there's little or no fist fights which considering Snipes background seems odd & a bit of a waste. Like a lot of these films The Marksman cannabises footage from it's peers, scenes from Top Gun (1986), Iron Eagle (1986), Navy Seals (1990) & Active Stealth (1999) are all edited into this & I think it's about the third or fourth time I have seen that parachute jump sequence from Navy Seals turn up in another film.Shot in Bucharest in Romania the film has a grey look to it, there's very little colour & I suppose it's meant to invoke the bleak cloudy weather of Eastern Europe or at least people perception of it. The acting is OK for this type of thing but Snipes seems to sleepwalk his way through this & as already mentioned barely has any dialogue.The Marksman isn't the worst straight-to-video shot in Eastern Europe action film out there but it's not the best either & has little to recommend it despite a slight better & more complex plot than usual, it's hard to recommend this even as something to watch for free on telly.

Poor cinematography, poor soundtrack, in fact just plain poor all round. The only condition under which this movie should be watched is if you're completely plastered, but still having trouble getting to sleep... this film will do the trick.The use of gadgets and gizmo's is yet another aspect of this movie which has been badly mistreated, just there to fill space in between boring action sequences. In fact in that respect they are much like this paragraph, of no real use but still required by the movie industry so the back cover doesn't give a duration of 10 min which is really all the plot was good for.