Chapo Trap House - 544 - Hit Me With Your Best Shot (7/26/21)

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

We take a look at the 2007 Antoine Fuqua/Mark Wahlberg film “Shooter,” a fascinating relic of the 2nd G.W. administration that asks the question “what if a hardass marine sniper operator type fuckin merked Dick Cheney?” Also, Matt brings up some deep lore from the author Stephen Hunter’s other novels that really makes him seem like a fertile well of insane ideas.

Hey gang, it's Joppo coming at you. Before we get into this week's show, I just want to, just a little statement about our, I guess, our next guest appearance on the show. I mean, like, obviously, we don't often turn the platform of the show over to elected politicians. You know, a lot of people don't think that's our role, really. And, you know, honestly, it's not one that we naturally feel comfortable with. But occasionally, I mean, there are people in office who we support. We like them, we're friends of them. And if there's anything we can do on our show to, you know, amplify their message, to platform them, I'll do it. And you know, like, so to that end, I would like to start today's show with a statement

read on air from front of the show, Louisiana's Representative Clay Higgins. Clay, would you spit please? We very much appreciate the tremendous outpouring of love and kindness over the past 10 days from the hundreds of friends and supporters who have reached out to me directly. I keep my family's private business back quiet because the evil in the world that we bear are uplifted by the love of God's children and quiet privacy does not mean secrecy. So here's the update. I have COVID. My son has COVID. He and I had COVID before early on in January 2020, before the world really knew what it was. So this is our second experience with the CCP biological

attack weaponized virus. And this episode is far more challenging. It has required all my devoted energy. We are all under excellent care and our prognosis is positive. We are very healthy, generally speaking, and our treatment of every health concern always encompasses Western, Eastern and holistic variables. I ask that my family's privacy be respected. Media inquiries should be directed to my DC office. I love and respect you all. I'm honored and humble to serve you in Congress. Our mission will continue. My family and I will recover fully. Your prayerful support has felt deep within my family and will never be forgotten. Respectfully, Clay Higgins. Thank you, Clay.

Well, sir, I'm really happy you're okay. I'm glad that you're combining all the types of medicine. That's the most important thing to do. Yeah, I'm giving acupuncture to my crocodile. I just a lot of details. I like that statement. But yeah, I feel like the best part is combining all Eastern and Western types of medicine on the road to recovery. I mean, this is the way of the shadow wolf. This is Steven Segal type knowledge that we've together the best. He is a Renaissance man, very similar to Segal. That's what I love about Clay Higgins is he zigs when you think he'll zag because it's like sight unseen if you're like, oh, Clay Higgins has a post about COVID. I'd be like,

oh, he thinks it's fake. But it's like, no, he's still holding on to like the Trump presidency era thing where it's like we're attacked by China. Yeah. But like, you know, is he going to say it's no big deal? No, he's going to like, you know, say that it's scary, but like he's like uniquely equipped to deal with it because he knows every type of medicine. I'm making a poultice. You know, the key to a good poultice for your COVID is the roof. You're going to get that nice and dark. You're going to get that coffee color roof before you apply the poultice. In that room, going to be saying, boom sherry. He's the bit like he should. We should like have a year with president. Oh, God, yes. Like

who cares? How about have a eternity where he's president? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like God Emperor. We have the Delaware version of Clay Higgins now. It's true. And it's like, you know, people are always writing articles that are like, why actually this is the best thing that's ever happened. Like what's what would be different? Really? He would just do like he would do like a military parade, but it would be like a big band style. He would have Delta Force guys like playing the washboard. Like he's he he's fucking cool. I'll tell you that that good weaponized CCCP weaponized militarized virus so good to make the jackrabbit slap the bell. It's time for Wilford Brimley from hard target to be president.

I think we can all agree. I really like what he has. I like always have. He had a he had a Facebook post a couple years ago. I remember reading where he just he's bright. He's humble bragging about how he's a world traveling police politician renaissance man. Yeah, it was 200. And he's just says 400 to 500 books read. No big deal. You know, those books are are like, you know, the soldiers of war. Yes, the warriors of World War Two, the generals of history, how to flip a house. Yeah, he is. It's like you've read 400 to 500 books. Every one of them is about D-Day. He knows everything can happen at D-Day. That's the post where he said he has like a 180 IQ, right? He's not just the smartest man in Congress.

That makes him the smartest man ever. Indeed. God damn it. He's like, yeah, even in some like unrealistic scenario where the Democrats like actually wanted to win like every seat, like they should keep him. It should be like DC's Congress. Like he should always be the representative for Louisiana at large. I don't know if he should vote or not, but like he should be there. He should be interviewed every fucking day. The I mean, aside from the blending East Eastern and Western medical traditions in his treatment of now his second case of COVID. The other thing I really liked in the Clay Higgins statement when he was like, it was like privacy does not equal to secrecy. And he's like, he's

basically like, I have to keep things quiet because of all the evil in the world. Deep facts, dude. Well, you remember he had that his wife had that vision about the stormtroopers showing up and taking their guns and water and medicine and alligators. And you got to wonder where her vision was when, you know, some guy with COVID was coughing directly in their mouths. Yeah. No. Yeah. It's I mean, maybe like some people's visions can only see like revelation stuff. And she was seeing revelation. She was she was just watching the film Hard Target. And they were like, yeah, when Lance

Hendrickson and Arnold Vosloo show up, they go, they go on us for sport. It's going to be the most dangerous guy. All right. Okay. Well, thanks to thanks to Representative Clay Higgins, wishing him a speedy recovery. What do you say again? Want to start the show? Yeah. Okay, let's go. Okay. Well, thanks again to Clay Higgins. We're back today. It's time to induct another movie into the chapeau film canon. Our mission today, should we choose to accept it, is to harken back to the bygone era of 2007. George Bush was in his second term in office, but post Hurricane Katrina, post surge, people were really not

feeling him as much as they did in the first Bush administration, people, the people were getting to sour on the Iraq war. And thus it became time for Hollywood to finally take a stab at an action movie that asked the question, what if you could shoot Dick Cheney in the head? Yeah, this was we had one year where you could make movies like this, like for most of the Bush administration, for the early part, when it actually mattered, Hollywood was like, no, we actually want to kill every Muslim in the world too. They like booed Michael Moore for being against Iraq war. They're completely along with it. They literally have

no courage of their convictions ever. But, you know, when after like 2005, 2006, when it became like acceptable to have like a very specific position against Iraq war, we're like, no, don't get me wrong, I was for it. But I think we're doing it wrong now. They made a bunch of shitty movies where like, you know, Matt Damon is like a good soldier. Yeah, the green zone. He's just being betrayed, you know, he's just being betrayed by the fat cats in Washington. But then there was like, it got so bad in America that there was about one year where you could make a big budget movie where you killed Dick Cheney and, you know, that to

make him black for the concert. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I did Dick Cheney... What do you mean like Bill Frists black basically. They're like, Alright, well, we still have to do that. So I would not put this movie in the category of like the shoot and cry Iraq war movies. Are they're like, Oh, we messed it up or it was incompetently prosecuted. And in fact, this movie is only about the war in Iraq in like a glancing way. I mean, it is about the war in Iraq in like a large way, but like it doesn't really figure into the plot too heavily.

The film we are going to be discussing today is Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Antoine Fuqua of Training Day of Fame. This is based on the, everyone's favorite series of books, the Bob Lee Swagger Point of Impact series, which Matt, you have actually read. Not all of them, but I've read a bunch. I read Dirty White Boys when I was in high school. I saw it on a rack at a grocery store, much as I saw American tabloid, and I bought the mass market paperback edition.

And the very first paragraph of that book, Dirty White Boys, which is tangentially related to the Bob Swagger books, is describing this terrifying criminal in a prison who's about to break out and talking about how he has the largest penis of any white man in the prison. This is a sign of a great book. He's played by Mark Wahlberg in this movie. Yeah, but that book actually is like that guy with the big penis turns out, if you read a bunch more books about in this verse, it really is like a Tolkien-esque world. You find out that he is the illegitimate son of Bob Lee Swagger's father, Earl Swagger,

who was an Arkansas state trooper who was assassinated by the CIA from a different book. The Clinton crime family, once again, back at it. But yeah, but so the Bob Lee Swagger is a Vietnam sniper. He was the best sniper in American history, killed like 500 people during the Vietnam War. And then he comes home and he's all traumatized. He lives alone in Arkansas, a hill country. And he just keeps getting dragged back into escapades and shenanigans.

And the first of their shenanigans is a book called Point of Impact, which was made later into Shooter. And it was written in the 80s. And so like some of the stuff, the detail plot details are different, but the basic arc of the story is the same. Yeah. So by the way, this is that pair. I wanted to find it.

We can put it back. We can edit it back in to make it flow better. But this is the I found the first paragraph of Dirty White Boy, the first, the first book by by Stephen Hunter, I read in high school, three men at McAllister State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pie, but all were black and therefore by Lamar's own figuring hardly human at all. His does count. Yep.

His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was, but rather like some form of rubber tubing. Damn. Well, I've already I mean, like, well, the the the Mark Wahlberg Antoine Foucault film adaptation has already missed the beat by focusing virtually not at all on Mark Wahlberg's just sort of, I guess, half related giant, veiny rubber hoes.

It's a damn shame. Well, I mean, we're going to the movie itself, like, like I said, I wanted to discuss this movie because it is one of the only movies I can think of to come out of the Bush era that is a sort of a left wing stab at making like an 80s style action movie. And I got to say, yeah, it pretty much works like I was I was rewatching this movie again. I was like, you know what, like this pretty much slaps and it's it's layered with all kinds of conspiracy-pilled little Easter eggs for you. So I mean, what did you guys make of Shooter?

Well, I've always like, loved this movie, like it's it's probably like the last movie like this will ever really see unless we get to make Luke Jumper where it is like, yeah, you can enjoy it like you enjoy John Wick where there is like actually pretty cool action. And it's like for as much as there is a plot, it's pretty fun. But is, you know, they are saying like the deep state and like the petroleum industry is evil. And it's like, we're probably just not going to see that again. They would absolutely not do a movie where like, yeah, there's just an ex-military guy

who's going around like fucking doming intelligence directors and senators. Like they would have to fuck up so bad for that to for Hollywood for them to like call the lizard men in Hollywood and be like, OK, make one of those to like release the pressure valve a little bit. Everything is so is run by algorithms now. So there's like a certain ceiling and a certain floor where this movie can't be made. I liked it at the time, but I did spend most of the time just having my arms folded just like this fucking this mass, this tiny T-Rex armed mass hole is not by a police swagger.

I'm sorry. It was like when they cast Tom Cruise and Jack Preacher. It was like a gimme capped hillbilly is just it doesn't play. I think in real life, if a guy did this in real life, which I'm not endorsing, I do not think you should do this. It would be like a five seven mass because he's like he's like unassuming. And if you saw that guy carrying like a duffel bag, a huge duffel bag with like a Barrett Fifty Cal, you would be like, oh, that's like his equipment to play in the mighty, mighty

Boston. He wants to play like something he wants to play some type of like electric harp on a clock tower during the president's speech. That's fine. I'll let him do that. Well, I mean, I do remember when this movie came out, like going back into my, you know, global recall for conservative media, I remember Jonah Goldberg of the National Review complaining about this movie when it came out, because he was just like, they're they killed Dick

Cheney. They're they think it's a conspiracy movie about how the oil, the oil industry controls our government and well, they just want to kill Dick Cheney. And like you would be, you would be mad too if like your mom lets you watch one violent movie a month and you wasted it on this thing, your best friend from the government, yeah, yeah. What the fuck? My mom won't let me have a do or I have to wait till next month.

Well, you know, I mean, for whatever reason, like the the stars aligned and this is why I think it is an interesting movie because they 1000% just don't Dick Cheney in this movie. So let's just let's just build up to that point. This is OK. So Shooter opens and the very first thing you see in this movie is like a long like helicopter tracking shot like, you know, like a coasting over this landscape that we later find out is in the Horn of Africa, a very, a very kinetic theater of operations when it comes

to US special forces, CIA contractors and various bad people. But the very first thing you see in this movie is an oil pipeline. The camera follows the oil pipeline up like, you know, up an embankment and there is just like at sort of a cliff ledge, we find Mark Wahlberg and his spotter. They are marine scout recon snipers, which are, you know, if you're if you're if you're into that kind of thing is, you know, by all accounts, the best of the best when it comes to scouting, spotting and shooting. They are there to provide sort of like overwatch that they're fired sniper cover for some

unspecified military operation that's going on, like I said, in what I believe is revealed to be the country of Ethiopia, they're either in Ethiopia or Eritrea, but either way, they're not officially supposed to be there. So, you know, basically, what happens is, you know, as you might expect on the sniper mission, shit goes sideways, shit goes sideways. And because they're not officially supposed to be in the country, they are abandoned. They are cut off by like the, you know, like the guys in the rear, you know, like, you know, spotting shit with drones and like all their cover is gone, and they are left to

fend for their own and, you know, ward off the assault of these, you know, some some militia group that, you know, they just like domed like 60 of them from like 5,000 yards away or something. I mean, like Mark Wahlberg in this movie is Steph Curry, right? I mean, he's he's just draining he's draining threes like like just whole in one every single time. And in the course of this mission going sideways, it's like, you know, they're supposed to cover some guys, but then they don't account for like, oh, there's another force of guys coming.

There's too many guys, not enough, not enough, no exit strategy for them. And as a result of it, his spotter and best friend is killed during this unofficial op. They're expendable, you know, and it's never good when you're one of these guys and you find out that you are expendable. I will note a little Easter egg for Wahlberg heads out there. His spotter and best friend is named Donnie, just like Mark Wahlberg's real life brother, Donnie Wahlberg. And, you know, I just wonder if that was just, you know, Mark and the filmmakers just

having a little just having a little fun with the audience. So yeah, in the end, so the mission in Africa goes sideways. His spotter is killed, but, you know, Bob Lee Swagger, AKA shooter, he's able to make it out alive and then the film jumps ahead in time, like three years. And we come across a shooter is now three years on, he's out of the military. And he is basically, he's become a ponytail guy living off the grid in Montana. And you know, he's sort of a sort of a gritty survivalist type. And you know that because like his only friend is a dog, and his dog is trained to bring

him beers from the refrigerator. But in one of my favorite scenes in the movie, like where we're, we see Wahlberg and he's living in his like Montana compound and they're like, oh, he shoots his own meat and grows his own vegetables. And, you know, he doesn't trust the government anymore. And we're, that's sort of illustrated by a Wahlberg guy, he comes into the house, his dog gets him a beer, he gives the dog some beer, and then he boots up the worldwide web. And as soon as he looks at his computer, he goes, let's see what lies they're trying to

sell us today. Yeah. And like that's, that scene, when I saw that scene, it was like, oh, they like literally wouldn't do this today. If they did Shooter today, it would be about like a brave Marine who's defending journalists. Well, see, that, yeah, that's the thing is that, is that a lot of that energy that, that the anti-establishment disillusioned energy that was channeled by this movie, and that Hunter expressed in a lot of his books before like 2008 or so, has just been funneled into

QAnon and general suspicion of authorities that because of the rise of, you know, Trump and everything, the people who make Hollywood, the people who make movies are way too devoted now in protecting against them. And so they just make the alienation worse by, by not even giving people a fucking vent by being like, no, actually, the journalists are always good. Yeah. They've literally, the CIA and the government are on your side. They've made several movies that like try to be like Shooter for journalists.

Yes. Like there is no, like, okay, there's definitely like no real life Bob, Bob Lee Swagger, but there's more of a chance of there being a Bobby Lee Swagger, like former Marine than there is any type of Bobby Lee Swagger journalist that just doesn't exist. There's no Swagger. Yeah. Another detail in this scene where he's like, let's see what lies they're trying to tell us today is on his desk, he does have a copy of the 9-11 commission report.

Now is this movie 9-11 filled? I don't know. I mean, not explicitly, but it raises enough issues in the plot of the movie to think that, you know, what are, what are they really trying to tell us here? What are they really trying to tell? Well, talk about, yeah, talk about something that would never, never, like there's so much in this movie. Like pretty much every shot has a thing where it's like, oh, now this would be called evil

disinformation. Yeah. Yeah. Now this movie, like anything in this movie that actually does like, you know, where they're not explicitly saying like, oh yeah, they put termite paint on the buildings, like something ridiculous like that. But they are saying like, okay, we'll think about like what specifically the security state allows us to happen.

If you did, like this is, you know, now the perspective on these things is like, if you know someone who even says that, you should contact the FBI. That's the popular liberal position on it. Well, shooter AKA Bob Lee Swagger does not, does not get much time to, to lounge in his, in his man cave with his, his dog friend because who comes driving up his driveway? One other than Danny Glover, but before he's introduced and it just cuts to Langley. It's Langley, Virginia. We all know, we all know it's our, it's our friends at the agency and it's a bunch of

guys sitting around a room and they've got their file open and the file, the Manila, the Manila folder is filled with nothing but Bob Lee Swagger. They want him for an unspecified mission and they roll up his driveway asking him to, you know, come, come, come back into the fold. Now remember, remember to Richard Jewel? We talked about the scene where it's like John Hamm. And as soon as they get your photo on the whiteboard, it's like, it's over for you. So as soon as, as soon as Bob Lee Swagger's photo is in their little dossier, he's fucked.

He's fucked. So, and then also, I think it's cool that Danny Glover is the bad guy. He's this like very vaguely associated army colonel who's just like black bag fucking like just, just like decades long fucking career doing ops for the fucking CIA. I think it's cool that Glover is in this role because, you know, Glover as far as Hollywood actors go is about as bona fide or lefty as you can find. And I, you know, I think Glover had a certain relish playing this fucking CIA colonel character. He had a great time in this role.

It is a pleasure every time he's not seen because it's like, yeah, I mean, there are probably other actors that would have done like a pretty good job, but he does a great job because he's like, no, yeah, I uniquely know that the CIA was trafficking drugs, that they're fucking abducting people, that they're doing all this shit. And he like, he really fucking has fun with it. Glover is a great villain in this movie. And essentially, yeah. So like they, you know, they pull up his driveway, they got like the government fucking black

SUVs and Wahlberg's like, you know, keep, keep on driving. I ain't interested in what you're selling, but Glover buffaloes him by pulling out a medal of honor and being like, oh, your dad had a medal of honor. Check this out. I have one too. Don't you want to hear what I have to say? And he just, he, he gets under all of, all those shooters, natural paranoia, anger, hatred of the government.

He gets right under his skin by pulling the old patriotism card. And what he tells him is that they need him to plan the assassination of the president of the United States, not execute it, merely plot out every detail about, hey, if you were to perhaps want to assassinate the president of the United States, how would you go about doing it? Because we have some, you know, unspecified foreign intel that says that there's a shooter in the country and he's going to take a shot at the president sometime over the next couple weeks at one of three speak public speaking engagements that the president is scheduled

to do from over like a thousand yards. And at that distance, there's like a five or six guys in the world who could reliably pull the trigger and hit the target on a shot like that. And Bob Lee Swagger is one of them. So they're saying, we need a guy with your mind to like, you know, help us get in the mind of this unspecified shooter and help us stop the assassination of the president. And they're like, he's like, you know, do you want to wake up next week and find the president has been shot and killed and you could have done something about it and you

didn't. And Mark Wahlberg says to him, he's like, I don't much care for this president. Don't much care for the one before him either. You know, he's like, he's a, he's disillusioned by politics, but he still feels the pull because he is a, you know, URA, Semper fi, Marine Scout recon sniper. But he still feels the pull of that, of the, of the, of the red, white and blue and this and the constitution and the idea that, you know, all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now for a guy who's already paranoid and like living off the grid and has been fucked over

by the government one time before and whose name is Bob Lee Swagger, just about the most presidential assassin name ever given to a human being. I kind of feel like he and of course you, the audience, you sort of know what's coming here as soon as he says yes to these guys. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if people are already referring to you by your three names, it's like, you know, what do you, what do you think you're going to be framed for, buddy?

Yeah. Yeah. You're one, they just told me you're one of five guys in the world who could like shoot a politician from like a mile away and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we want you to stop someone from doing that. I'd like to shout out as well. Danny Glover's goon in this movie is played by Elias Coteas, who's a very slimy sort of evil henchman in this movie.

And one of the first thing he does is Mark Wahlberg's dog doesn't like him. And Elias Coteas being a, being a consummate fed, as soon as you see Wahlberg's dog, he just starts reaching for his sidearm. Yes. There are so many, there are so many great character actors in this movie. Like if you were making a movie, possibly inspired by this movie about a time travel Bob Lee Swagger, you would just go down the IMDB for this movie. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think it's interesting, one of the things like when they're, so a Wahlberg initially to a shooter initially says no to them, he's like, you know, I don't want nothing to do with, with the damn government anymore. And as they're leaving in the fed, black SUV, Elias Coteas is like, oh, like the guy turned us down and Danny Glover's like, oh no, he said yes, he just doesn't know it yet. And what he says is that shooter Bob Lee Swagger has basically, if you look at his file, he's a man with a history that says duty, honor, and patriotism. But because of the incident in the Horn of Africa where duty, honor, and patriotism led

to, you know, having his friend be killed and him be trade, when you lose that sense of that system of belief, when that collapses, you don't know where to turn to or what to do. Well, when you become vulnerable like that, you certainly make an interesting target for men like Danny Glover and the agency to, let's just say, fill the void where that sense of honor, duty, and patriotism once was. So of course, of course, shooter Bob Lee Swagger is going to come out of retirement and he is going to help Glover and his team stop this supposed assassination of the President

of the United States. So, you know, he scopes out the locations and he determines that there is only one location in which the President could be assassinated in this manner. And that is in Philadelphia, appropriately, because it's the only city in America where you could do something like that and get away with it. Yeah. You're going to assassinate the President by hooking a battery at his head. The President is a Giants fan and he's going to speak at Independence Hall and let's just

say things are going to happen. So like, you know, this whole time like the President shows up, but speaking before the President is the Archbishop of Ethiopia and this is sort of like a Desmond Tutu like character. And before he gets on stage, we are introduced to Michael Pena's character, who is an FBI agent who's just, you know, on the scene, he's there to, you know, work the President being in town and, of course, he's going to become like, you know, a main character in this movie. But here's the first big conspiracy Easter egg in this movie.

So like, while Wahlberg is set up with Denny Glover and Elias Coteas and all the CIA guys that they're like little overwatch position and they all have binoculars and he's like, he's like, the shoot is loading the gun right now, we've got to take them out. Where's the police? What's going on here? They bring in a local Philadelphia police officer who's like their man on the scene and he's like this sweaty fat guy who's like already nervous. His gun is already unsnapped, which Wahlberg clocks instantly.

The name of the Philadelphia police officer, I don't know if you guys caught this, is Officer Timmons. Now, if you, if you can tell me that this isn't an absolute reference to Officer JD Tippet, the officer and probably cut out and handler for Lee Harvey Oswald, who was killed by him, you know, hours before Oswald was arrested in that movie theater, I don't know, I got, I got a bridge to sell you. I've got a presidential assassination plot. I'd like you to plan for me.

So we've got Officer JD Tippet, who's like, it's an honor to meet you. It's an honor to meet you, Shuda. And you know, he's sweating, he's sweaty, you know, something's up. And then like, you know, as it gets closer to the president taking the stage, Wahlberg's like, he's like, what's the matter, we gotta, we gotta arrest this guy. He's the shooter. What's going on? And then of course, Officer JD Tippet shoots him in the back right after not the president,

but the archbishop of Ethiopia gets fucking his wig split. And he's standing in, he's standing next to the president. So it is interpreted as a failed assassination attempt on the president, but archbishop of Ethiopia, he is no more. And Wahlberg in the, in the book, which is written in the 80s, it's sort of an Oscar Romero type Catholic pre prelate from Central America. Right. Well, I mean, you just like, you was when we were just going to go into town down there.

It was basically about the El Mazzote massacre. The book was. Well, the massacre that, that this movie is about, like I said, takes place in the Horn of Africa, which is, you know, very fitting for both, you know, the time this movie came out and now as well, the Horn of Africa is like one of the biggest theaters of like covert involvement for US special forces, the CIA, et cetera, et cetera. So the archbishop is assassinated by an unknown shooter, but like instantly as that happens, shooter J.D. tippet attempts to, you know, snip those loose ends and kill shooter J, shooter

Bob Lee Swagger, but he is not, he's a, come on, he, this guy's a Philly cop. He's not a good shooter. He's fucking, he's sweating cheesesteak. He fucks it up. Swagger gets away and is immediately the subject of like a nationwide manhunt. There's like, this actually like the scene of him getting away, I thought was really well done because there's like 10,000 helicopters in the skies over Philly looking for them. They're all like sweeping around.

It's like all very well filmed. And also what I appreciated about this, this scene and this whole sequence is that it really does take seriously like how bad it is to get hit with even two like small caliber bullets in non-lethal areas because like he has to run away, steal a car and then like do surgery on himself. And what I liked about this movie is that it showed that there are like three different stages of him doing self-suck on himself to like not bleed to death. And I thought it was like a pretty realistic, pretty high stakes, sort of like a very taught

scene of him having to escape and also not bleed to death from his various gunshot wounds. But he is only able to escape because in fleeing the scene of his setup, he comes across Michael Payne who's just this dipshit FBI agent fresh out of the academy just going like, oh look all good checking in here. And Wahlberg of course immediately gets the drop on him, steals his gun, handcuffs and car, but not before telling him, and this is the only person he gets a chance to talk to, this lonely FBI agent played by Michael Payne, he says, it's a setup. I didn't shoot the president.

So he is able to escape Philadelphia and there's now the... Which is all the most heroic thing he does in the movie, get out of Philadelphia. They were going to make him dress up like Gritty and Crump. They framed him. They were like, you have to say that Gritty is socialist, say that you tried to kill the president. And he was like, no. He fucked around and found out.

Yeah. Yeah, no, he's bleeding, he needs to get off the streets, there's only one way to go in Philadelphia. That's Baltimore Matt's house. If you want to remove a bullet from you, maybe take a leak. Yeah. Bobby Swagger is able to get away, sort of stitched up their whole plans, and then we see officer JD Tippett is like being interviewed on the news and they're like, oh, he was able

to... He saw his gun sticking out of a window and was able to shoot him in the process of apprehending. I'm a very, very familiar playbook we're talking about here, very, very familiar. And of course, Michael Pena, FBI agent, now has to look like a huge pussy in front of everyone else in the agency. And they're like, you disgrace the agency, you're going up for the office of professional review. And I sort of like the scene where Pena was like, I just graduated the academy two weeks

ago and you're saying that this guy is a Marine scout sniper with like 500 confirmed kills. Like, what do you mean? What the fuck? What the fuck would you have done? I'm looking to be alive. Oh, sorry, I didn't defeat him in hand-to-hand combat. Like the most dangerous guy on the planet, oh well. But because he gets sunned so badly by his shithead superiors at the FBI, one of them

was played by Tate Donovan. I know you guys are a fan of his work from the OC as America's favorite dad from Orange County. And as Ray's younger brother on the program of that name. But because he's so... Something doesn't sit right with Michael Pena's character. Now here would be a good time to talk about the name of Michael Pena's character, which is very odd until something clicks.

The name of Michael Pena's character is Nicholas Memphis, which is a very odd name for any human being, but it's also a very odd name to give a character and an actor who's like a very prominent Hispanic American. Like you think they would have given him a more, something a little bit more fitting than Nicholas Memphis, which sounds like a porn star's name. I was like, what's up with that until, what's the last name, what's that city again, Memphis? Was there another famous assassination that happened in Memphis involving the FBI? Yes, there was.

I think it is a coded reference to the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and the FBI's, shall we say, I don't know, the cloud that hovers over that regarding the FBI and that assassination and the shooter involved in it, who perhaps was also a Patsy, speaking of James Earl Ray, another three-named sort of like cracker shooter, who I personally think fits a way, way more open and shut case on like textbook Patsy than even Lee Harvey Oswald. So like I said, I think the filmmakers of this movie are, they're not putting their thumb all the way on the scale, but they are hinting at a lot of what this movie implies and what

they're really trying to say with this action movie. So there's another really good scene of Mark Wahlberg doing self-suck on himself. He uses like a turkey baster to like fill his veins with sugar water. And Michael Pena, like he's like, oh, like a hardware store, like someone bought sugar water from them. And I think he's an Asian Napoleon listener or something because he's like, they've been using sugar water to treat battlefield wounds since the Napoleonic era. And they're like, shut up, loser.

Go back to clocking phone calls. Yeah. They're like, we listen to true crime podcasts at the bureau, you fucking pussy. So then check out ageofnapoleon.com. So then Bob Lee Swagger is, of course, on the run, he's like the most wanted man in the world. So he's got to turn to someone for help. And of course, like a good Marine, who you're going to turn to, the wife of your dead friend

who you've never met even once. He just shows up at her house and he's like, you got to help me. I didn't kill the president. And then she's like, of course you didn't kill the president, you idiot. You killed the Archbishop of Ethiopia. She's played by Kate Mara. And of course she helps him. Of course she believes him because, you know, I mean, like her character psychology is funny

because his face is all over the news. She's never even met this guy. The only thing she knows about him is that like he was with her husband when he died in the line of duty. And then he just shows up and everyone's like, oh, like he's the most wanted assassin in the world. And he's like, you got to believe me. I didn't do it.

And she's like, okay, I'll help you. And no one said like military wives, like they're not praised for being smart. Like they're praised for being like, you know, strong and nice, but not smart. Well, I mean, well, she is smart because, you know, she trusts that, you know, he is on the level and that she's smart enough to know that, hey, the lying fake news media, if they're doing everything possible to make you think that this guy is the shooter, maybe he's not. So of course she helps him.

She stitches him up and, you know, he's back to fighting shape and he knows that he needs to take down Danny Glover and the people who set him up. Oh, and then also he finds out through Kate Mara's character that the news included in the account that they killed his dog, the dog that he trained from birth to fetch beers for him from the fridge, Elias Coteas made good on his threat and killed Mark Wahlberg's dog. And then he planted a news story about like he even killed his dog because he knew he wasn't coming back.

And now it's like, okay, I mean, if these people weren't marked for death before, I mean, come on, just dig your own grave right now, homie. You played yourself. They killed his fucking dog. This is like John Wick gets a lot from this movie. And you know, they basically do John Wick, but whereas John Wick is like in service of like lore about a secret hotel, like, you know, this is about the deep state. It's about JFK, it's about the MLK assassination, it's about everything.

And then, you know, as this is going on, Michael Pena's character, Nicholas Memphis, is beginning to sort of cotton to the idea that like maybe, maybe the story here that like his bosses are so wed to aren't adding up, because like when they debrief him after like they, they make extra, they give them the full court press to leave out from his like official write up of the incident that shooter told him in the moment that this is a setup. I didn't kill the president. And then he begins to notice things like how, you know, how come is it that the FBI field office had like every single piece of information about Bob Lee Swagger, like 20 minutes after

he supposedly pulled the trigger? He's like, you know, he's just, he's getting, he's getting conspiracy-pilled on what's going on here. And the fact that like, you know, like he, like he figures out that like Mark Wahlberg is like the best sniper in world history. So like how could he have missed a shot by two feet? You know, it just, it doesn't make sense. So I mean, he begins to, Pena and him, they become allies and they become allies because

shooter Bob Lee Swagger uses him as bait to like lure the deep state assassins out of the muck because they know they're looking for him and he's got to get them to show themselves. So he does that by exposing Michael Pena to their scrutiny or whatever. And they abduct him and probably one of my favorite details of this movie, they abduct him, they torture him and interrogate him to like, you know, get, get what he knows about their plot. And then they, like, I swear to God, I've never seen this in a movie before or since. And it's another, it's another one of those things that like really make you go, hmm,

they break out this like bizarre saw type contraption to get him to shoot himself in the head. It's like a neck brace and like an arm, it's like, it's like an arm crank like neck break medical device that like pulls your hand towards your head with a gun in it and then makes you pull the trigger so that forensically it will look like you pulled the trigger on yourself. And the guy's doing this, the guy's doing this to him and go, it's not the first time we've done this.

It works. And I was just sort of going, hmm, hmm, interesting. I know. I remember the first time I saw that, I was like, damn, that could, that could work. Is that a device? Is that a real thing? I was like, this makes sense. I was like, fuck.

I was just like going through my head of like, oh, I love just shooting themselves. And I was in the head when they're like very close to being interviewed for conspiracy related cases. It's a very common thing that happens. But you know, but before they can use the suicide device on Michael Peña, of course, this was all, this was, he was, this was all just bait because shooter Bob Lee Swagger domes like six guys with a.22 caliber rifle from a canoe he's sitting in. That's, folks, that's how good a shooter this shooter is.

So then him and him and painting a team up, he's got a, he's got a new, he's got a new spotter now. And where do they go? And like, okay. So right after my favorite bit of conspiracy lore in this movie regarding the suicide device, we get a wonderful cameo performance in this movie of the great leave on helm. Probably I would say one of the best musicians turned actors. You may remember him from the coal miner's daughter and the right stuff.

In this movie, he plays a Tennessee legend who's just an old man who lives in Tennessee and knows a lot about guns and his friends with Bob Lee Swagger. This was probably like my favorite scene in the movie, my favorite role in the movie, leave on helm is a joy in this role as the old Tennessee gunsmith who hips Peña and Walberg to the idea that you can wrap an already fired shell casing in paper and fire the same casing through a different gun and have the grooves on the chain, the casing match it, what the gun it was originally fired from. So this is how they set up Walberg to be like, it's his rifle, his bullet fired from this

gun. It's, it's, it's a thousand percent link. And leave on helm. I'll point out that during this scene, Michael Peña is wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. And, and you know, there's a great line where leave on helm says of the government and the media. He said, they also said that artificial sweeteners were safe and WMDs were in Iraq and Adam Nicole married for love.

And then he says that like, this is the way it always works in a conspiracy works in boys on the grass. You know, they were dead within three hours, buried in the damn desert, unmarked graves out past her lingua, and you know this for a fact, still got to shovel. This is definitely the most Stephen Hunter part of the book movie. He also loves gunsmiths. He loves anybody who is good making or firing guns. In fact, he has a really insane book called Pale Horse Coming about Bobby Swagger's dad

in the fifties liberating a prison in Arkansas that's being used to test nuclear syphilis on black inmates, and he does it with the help of a dirty dozen team of famous gunsmiths, all of whom are based on real guys. That sounds awesome. He's like an absolute weed for guns. Yeah, that sounds sick. Can we buy the rights to that? Can we buy the rights to that book?

Oh, and, oh, there's all no, I'm sorry, it's gunsmiths and then a thinly veiled Audi Murphy that fucking owns. God damn. That's so fucking sick testing, testing radioactive syphilis. It's on African-American inmates in the Arkansas prison system. I mean, not too much of a stretch. No, not at all. Not at all.

Wow. Yeah. No, that's another thing that isn't really talked about that much in most media. The American government, beyond even Tuskegee, testing biological warfare on black Americans. Korean War. Let's go down that rabbit hole. So basically, they realized that, okay, look, so there's Mark Wahlberg, Bobby Swagger wasn't the real shooter.

So there's another shooter. And they find out, they realize, because obviously leave on helm, it's like he knows personally like the three other guys on the planet who could have theoretically made that shot. And wouldn't you know it, shooter Bobby Swagger has already met one of them. And it's a guy you wouldn't think because there's this, obviously, okay, he's played by character actor Red Scherbega, who you may remember from Snatch and Eyes Wide Shut as the guy who tries to pimp out his daughter to Tom Cruise. But like when this guy shows up in the movie, you know he's the bad guy.

You know he's the bad guy. But he's in a wheelchair. So like, hmm, they're like, oh, how did he make the shot? Well, they did it using a robot of some kind. They do it with a computer program and like a, like a stationary, like a computer mounted and aimed rifle apparatus, but I guess Scherbega's character is the one who like, you know, typed in the coordinates to like make sure the shot goes off successfully. So he becomes the focus of like now the deep state and like Danny Glover and now Ned Beatty,

who's introduced as a Ned Beatty RIP to another legend. He comes in as a senator from Montana, who is our very thinly veiled Dick Cheney analog. And now like they realize they're being hunted by Bob Lee Swagger and the way that they are going to draw him out is similar to what Bob Lee Swagger did with Michael Pena's character. They are going to sort of dangle out Red Scherbega there to sort of like flush him out, you know, flush him out. So this sets up, they're going to like, they know where he is, he's like a sort of like ranch house in Virginia. It's just Michael Pena and Mark Wahlberg alone are going to do a raid on this guy and what

they know to be for certain is a trap designed to do exactly that to, you know, get them to go for this guy. And this leads to like one of my favorite things that can happen in an action movie, a shopping trip to Home Depot where the principals blow racks, buy out the store and use common household and yard work appliances to make a host of homemade bombs, booby traps and weapons. So like they make a shitload of like tear gas, napalm and pipe, pipe, pipe bombs and improvised explosives with common items that can be found in any supermarket in America. And they set up for a big raid on this guy's house and they do it, it's a fucking, it's

an awesome action sequence, a lot of really good stealth knife kills by Bobby Swagger before the shit really pops off. But when he finally is like, you know, face to face or gun to face with a rage Scherbega, he sort of spills the whole truth to him. And what he says to him is very interesting. He says, the truth is that nothing, no matter how horrible, happens without the approval of our government, either here or over there. And he uses Abu Ghraib as an example.

And like the character he's portraying is like a fucking like, like true war criminal. Like it probably implied like a sniper in the Bosnian war or something like that who like Bobby Swagger has been approached by Danny Glover at one point and given, let's just say a choice to be recruited or not. He says, yes, nothing happens over there or here, no matter how horrible, without the knowledge and approval of the government. He says, there's no head to cut off because it's a conglomerate. And if one man betrays the principles of the accrual of money and power, then everyone

else betrays him. It's human weakness and you can't kill that with a gun. And in doing so, he lets Walberg know that in the very first scene in the movie where he like, he covers the retreat of these operators in the Horn of Africa, he was in fact covering a group of military contractors who had just executed an entire village of people and buried them in a mass grave because they didn't want a pipeline to be built through their ancestral homelands. So and he was, he was never meant to leave the Horn of Africa alive.

If you want to have someone who looks very much like a human beat, explain how capitalism actually works. You get Ned Beatty. There is so much I love about this stretch of the movie. First I love stealth knife kills in movies. We don't see enough of them. I love like a CQC takedown. Fucking awesome.

If you do something where you kick out the back of someone's knee and then jam the knife into the carotid artery and put your fucking hand over your mouth and then you see a little blood seep through the fingers, amazing. But yeah, the, again, this movie is dead on because a lesser film and a lot of lesser films that follow this movie, they're in this movie's general sphere, it would be like, oh, there's one big guy, you know, we have to take down the big fucking Dick Cheney guy. This movie understands, no, you kill him, 10 other fucking ambitious psychos are rising up to take its place.

This is basically automated at this point. So I mean, like, like him and Pena take out like an entire fire team of operators who like are converged on this property and get fucking shredded by homemade napalm and pipe bombs. It's pretty awesome. He takes out a helicopter by shooting a giant propane tank and like all the guys hanging off the sides of the machine guns get cooked alive. It's it's pretty hard body.

It's pretty hard body. That scene, that scene, them getting cooked in the helicopter. It felt like the filmmakers were saying, this is payback for Waco specifically kill them that way, like fucking tight. So I mean, like, you know, we don't have to blame her too much. This all leads to the final showdown because of course, Danny Glover and his minions have connected Kate Mara's character to Bob Lee Swagger, and they have, of course, kidnapped her.

Elias Coteas's character has to give us off severely rapey vibes when he is like menacing Kate Mara. Very, very nasty, very gross character. She is their hostage now. And if Bob Lee Swagger would like her back alive, then he has to they have to arrange a sort of a a handoff of the evidence that Bob Lee Swagger has. He recorded Rage Shurvega when he was talking about their plan to not their plan, their the atrocity that they committed in Ethiopia on behalf of sitting U.S. Senator Ned Beatty.

And Bob Lee Swagger says, okay, like, we'll do the handoff, but Ned Beatty has to be there. And they like, take a helicopter up to like the top of a fucking mountain. So like, it's like, it's all snow capped, it's all in white, so that there's like no chance that he can like, you know, get the drop on them or they can see him coming, right? Because he's shooter. Folks, he's shooter. All right. You know, he does one thing.

And you know, it's going to be sniping. So suffice to say, by the end, Mark Wahlberg kills, like shoots through the fucking telescopic lens about three different guys who are like all have positions, like, you know, he gets to drop on all of them. Elias Cotay hits his character, has one of the best movie deaths that I've seen recently, where he's got a shotgun to Kate Mara's back and he's like, you got no shot, shooter. You got no shot. So then Mark Wahlberg then shoots his hand off.

His hand is on the trigger. He shoots him with like a 50 caliber bullet and like explodes his hand and then shoots his arm off after that. So Elias Cotay is like, he took the shot. He's like, you took the shot, shooter. You did good. And then he fires another shot and his whole arm just gets blown off his body. This is where modern warfare two took you shooting off that guy's arm.

I'm convinced because, you know, again, a lesser movie would just show like the exit wound of like, you know, 45 at most. This is a movie that will show using a Barrett 50 kill, using anti-material rounds to literally explode body parts. Amazing. Would not happen today. This happens today. Shooter is like he finds some ancient relic and shoots lasers out of his fucking hands.

And even if he did do it, god damn it, you know, it would be CGI. Yep. It would look like dog shit. This is a very good, very good bloody stump if I can just, just meat, meat flying off this asshole. So of course, this is why whenever I go on a hinge date, this is the movie I watch with girls hopelessly. They don't make them like this anymore.

So of course, you know, just kidding. I only do that with casino. So you know, shooter, of course, reveals his position. It would seem that they have now, you know, they're holding all the cards when it comes to Ned Beatty and Danny Glover. But you know, shooter is no dummy. He burns the evidence that he has, the tape recording, because he's like, this is too hot.

There's nobody, like the evidence is on this tape is so damning that there's nobody we can give it to because it'll just mark us for death. Like the FBI, nobody's going to help us with this shit. Destroying it is like our only, like for me and Kate Mara and like the people we love, this is our only real protection is destroying this evidence. I mean, I think the kind of the opposite would be true. I would probably hold on to a copy of that record. But Ned Beatty, of course, like, you know, very network like has this monologue at the

end of the movie on the top of this mountain where he's like, he says to Gunny, he's like, Gunny, listen, boy, there are no sides. There are no Soonies, no Shiites, no Republicans, no Democrats. There's just the haves and the have nots. And do you want to be at the table with the haves or do you want to be on the outside looking in? There's only so many places at the table, Gunny. Now are you on the inside?

Are you on the out? He's like, I'm a senator, boy, let me tell you, I'm going back to Washington, D.C. and he like, you know, sort of trundles off back to his helicopter. And Danny Glover is like, guess what, shooter, I won. You lose once again. And so like, seemingly at the end of this movie, Danny Glover and Ned Beatty get away with it. And Mark Wahlberg is taken into custody.

But he has given a chance to have, after he is arrested for assassinating the Archbishop of Ethiopia or an attempted, an attempt on the life of the president, he is taken into custody and then given a private audience with the Attorney General of the United States to plead his case. And he's in, he's in county, he's in the orange jumpsuit. He shackled and he's like, do you mind giving me, you mind uncuffing me? They're like, yeah, sure, what's, what's the worst that could happen, right? They, they unshackle him and bring in his like huge Marine sniper rifle, the one that

he allegedly took the shot that killed the Archbishop with in Michael Pena hands him a bullet of which he then loads into the breach of this gigantic sniper rifle in a room with the Attorney General, loads it, points it at Danny Glover and pulls the trigger. But it does not go off. Why? Because as, as, as an accomplished and responsible gun mage, Mark Wahlberg, when he left, when he left to do the sniper mission, took out all the firing pins on all of his weapons as he normally does when he leaves his compound for any amount of time.

I mean, come on, you're not just going to be leaving Marine sniper rifles around for just anyone to use. And with that amazing demonstration, that is enough for the Attorney General to be like, well, you can leave. You're a free man, which I thought was, you know, perhaps one of the more unrealistic parts of this movie. Do you think it was an illusion to John Ashcroft sort of passively being against warrantless wiretapping?

I think more than anything, it's, it's, it's proof that there is a limitation to this kind of storytelling in mainstream movies because you need to have the hero not get fucking murked, you know? You need to have some sort of satisfying, vindicating ending. And that means that you have to, at the end of the day, appeal to the same institutions and standards and laws that the whole movie has spent its runtime telling you we're all fake. Well, yeah, I do think that like this is very rooted in the time that there is still like,

I saw, you know, you would see people who were like full on 9-11 truthers who would still like talk about how they had a, you know, little pocketbook or the Bill of Rights. This is people, people would go very far, you know, the, the much beloved based liberals of the past, but there is still like this love of America and misbelief that's if you just worked hard enough, the rules would work for everyone. That's what that type of Oliver Stone liberalism is. It's like, it's not, we have to totally redo the system. It's like, no, these, the ground works great.

We just have to apply it to everyone. And also like, narratively, I do like it though, because it's like, he's gone through all this, not to change anything, not to really change the world. But this is what you have to do to make the government leave you alone if they've decided that you'll be passing. Yeah. And the attorney general tells him, he's like, look, I don't like the way this shakes out any more than you do, but you know, this isn't the old West anymore where you can, you know,

clean up the streets of the gun, even though sometime that's exactly what needs to be done. And this is of course, after he's given evidence that, you know, Danny Glover, IE the US government did a war crime in Africa, like filled a mass grave with fucking men, women and children so they could build a fucking oil pipeline. But what he says is, look, this isn't the world court. And I don't have the authority to prosecute Danny Glover for what he may or may not have done overseas. And then of course, Glover with his like shit eating smile slides out of the room before

telling Bob Lee Swagger, shooter, I win again, you lose. And then it's like, oh, wow, is there no justice in this world? Well, the next scene is they're at, they're at Ned Beatty's fucking like hunting lodge in Montana, and they're all having cigars and brandy around the fireplace going gentlemen to evil. And they're like, you know, they're like, I would have loved to see the look on his face when you said that you could kill anyone you want in Africa, and there's nothing he could do about it.

And then like, Ned Beatty literally says, the truth is what I say it is, boys. And then they're like, okay, you're getting on a flight tomorrow, there's the situation in Ecuador with the locals that needs your, your attention, Danny. And then he's just like, well, the situation is solvable as always. And they're, they're yucking it up, they're having a, they're having a great little victory party for themselves, but come on, come on, you know what's going to happen. You just hear that, that tink of a glass, you hear that little glass shatter. And yeah, it's a sniper rifle bullet coming straight through the window fucking taken

out all their, all their goons, because it's just Mark Wahlberg, the attorney general was like, boy, it would be a shame if someone took the law into their own hands with a gun and did what, did what I wish I could do. And it's, it's Bob Lee swagger shooter doing exactly that. He fucking shoots Danny Glover through the throat with a rifle. One of their other lackeys who's he just shot in the leg is just like, wait, it wasn't me. I just work for them. I'm not responsible, domes him in the head.

And then probably the best of the last line of the movie is great. Ned Beatty is like, no, no, wait, wait here a second, boy, no, no, wait here a second. You don't understand. I'm a sitting United States senator. And Bob Lee swagger goes exactly and then just domes him with a 45. And like, yeah, this will make this move unless, unless there's like a thing where like people in office jobs can't access like enough drinking water across the country and not just in America. That won't ever be in a big budget movie again.

And that that's why if you look at Stephen Hunter's books and they kept getting weirder and I think you could really trace the alienation of like people who are broadly, you know, fixated on like these notions of American heroism and competency, but who are also alienated from the government. They're going from being sort of generalized anti establishment types the way that Hunter wrote in the 80s and 90s to being more like hardcore conservative ideologues as over time. And it really is because, you know, the only real political question becomes one of your cultural affinities and things like being a badass who really likes guns is coded in

such a way that eventually if you are like that and that like you care about that stuff, you kind of get trundled into, even if you don't want to, into being a conservative. So one of Hunter's more recent books, I think from 2011 is called Soft Target. And it is about Ray Cruz, who is Bob Lee Swagger's illegitimate son and who took over for Bob Swagger in the books because, you know, at that point Bob Swagger's in the 60s, he can't be doing all the real hardcore action stuff. He's in the Mall of America when it gets attacked by Somali Muslim fundamentalist terrorists who start just shooting the place up and he has to just go die hard on them.

Meanwhile, outside the incompetent police response to the shooting is being coordinated by Minnesota State Police Commander Douglas Obobo, the half Kenyan graduate of Harvard Law who got the job because of his fancy speeches and who doesn't know what he's doing and has to get schooled by Ray Cruz on how to really deal with terrorism. Is this character a stand-in or something? I don't get it. Douglas Obobo? I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. Okay. But like he literally has an allegory where the America, it's called in the book, it's called America the Mall is under terrorist siege and incompetent obongler fucks it up and it's up to a guy with a gun to save everything. And he also wrote a book with Bob Lee Swagger that is one of the most insane plots I've ever encountered. It's about a Yakuza boss who is in charge of like a lot of the pornography in Japan who

is seeking to possess the actual katana that was used to kill the bad guy in the legendary 47 Roanin tale, the real life version, so that he can wield the influence of it to take over the Japanese pornography industry and prevent American actresses from being used in it. Okay. They're undermining the purity of Japanese pornography. The Stephen Hunter literary canon is, I think what we've really discovered in this episode is the most untapped gold mine for movies that I think we should produce and write.

We should make all of these books into movies. He also, by the way, wrote a Bob Lee Swagger movie about the Kennedy assassination called the Third Bullet. This is like, that is, the Japanese one speaks like a very specific type of guy who got a sexual complex while serving in the Philippines. Most of those guys are dead. Most of the guys who like, they were like either like before Vietnam or like right after where they like, you know, they're like as Matt said, sort of like vaguely distrustful

the government, army veterans or whatever, and like the main thing they picked up from their military service is like generals are stupid and they're like obsessed with Filipino women. They're obsessed with Korean women or Japanese women. Most of those guys got heart conditions. They've passed on. Coming back a little bit, the sad thing about all this is that, yeah, like most of the guys that the books were for, yeah, they just, they got folded into Trump world.

Just like how Alex Jones got shittier after Trump because it's like, oh, he's just like he's running like a form of PR for like the Republican frontrunner and then president. But the film version of this, it works twofold. The type of liberal that was, you know, ambiently distrustful of intelligence agencies and shit. And like, you know, as we've long talked about, having did a very good job of identifying the problems, not such a good job of identifying the solutions, yeah, they just became MSNBC viewers. Suddenly they loved John Brennan.

You all get, you get rolled into one thing or the other. Yeah. And that means that, that all of those, all of that current can only be expressed culturally by Dr. Nair, like explicitly reactionary stuff now. Like, there's no place for, for a disillusioned sniper to find out that the world is bullshit. Yeah. I just, sorry, I'm still like, I'm still a little bit left sort of speechless by the power of the idea that a Yakuza boss would seek out the legendary blade of the 47 Ronin,

like it's the spear of Longinus or something. It will allow, it will give him the power to prevent Jenna Jamison from taking over the Japanese pornography industry with her, with her, with her Buxom blonde assets. It's degenerate. Getting, letting, letting the blue-eyed devils into the, into the port industry is, is the death of Japanese honor. Well, what I would say about this movie about the death of American honor is that, again, like back to that last scene where he says, I'm a sitting U.S. Senator.

And then Bob Lee Swagger says exactly before fucking putting a bullet right between his eyes. I mean, like I said at the beginning of this movie, this is, this is a rare piece of Hollywood cinema and then it came out in 2007. And the movie is, as its conservative critics at the time accurately clocked, an unambiguous wish for film and fantasy about capping fucking Dick Cheney. Unambiguous. I mean, there's even like on, there's a scene on the mountain where Ned Beatty's character

literally says, this is a country where the secretary of defense can go on TV and tell the American public, oh, that this is about freedom, it's not about oil. And everyone believes it because it's a lie and nobody wants to hear the truth. They talk about Abu Ghraib in this movie, they talk about the WMD's not being in Iraq, and then you have, you know, this Senator character in Ned Beatty getting fucking executed by Bob Lee Swagger. And I don't know, it's a rich and powerful text. But like I said, it's just, you know, like a lot of times like in movies like Independence

Day or Armageddon or like, we as Americans, we love to see America get destroyed in movies. But very rarely, like, I mean, it is the special movie in which we like a popular movie audience will succumb to willingly the fantasy of seeing specific figures in the American government destroyed for fun and entertainment. And this is what Shooter does splendidly. So yeah, I mean, it's like, it serves the same purpose culturally as like the carnival of medieval era, like, hey, we know that these people rule us without any ability to stop them.

But occasionally we can at least watch them get their heads blown open by a cool, by a cool small man from Massachusetts. And now we can't even have, they can't even have that anymore. Yeah, no, the only people that like snap anymore are people who are like, yeah, everything is against me. I like my life is just a cycle of degradation and pain. I'm going to kill everyone at a frozen yogurt place. Well, congratulations to Shooter, Bob Lee Swagger, congratulations to Stephen Hunter, congratulations

to Antoine Fuqua for bringing us Shooter. Till next time, gentlemen, stay frosty, stay spotting, stay scoped up, stay scoped up, keep spotting those, keep spotting those ops.