A new Rambo for a new millennium. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger (a compact, tense, stoic, unswaggering Mark Wahlberg), already abandoned once in the field in Ethiopia, is lured out of mountaintop retirement ostensibly to use his sniper know-how to foil a plot to assassinate the President but in reality to be fitted for a frame. The film, slickly fashioned by Antoine Fuqua, feeds off contradictory pieties of post-9/11: the righteousness of the fighting man (Support Our Troops) and the rottenness of the government (Bring Our Troops Home). "Don't really like the President much," the taciturn hero volunteers, and then broadening the political point, "Didn't like the one before him much, either." (Grunts, good; Commanders-in-Chief, bad.) The frightening efficiency, nay, invincibility, of the fighting man is liable to rally less consensus; and as our One-Man Army mows down more foes than you've got fingers and toes, he taxes your credulity if not your patience: two busy hours, action-packed, -crammed, -laden, -clogged. Still, there's sufficient pause for good character bits from Levon Helm as a bluegrass gunsmith and Ned Beatty as a Senatorial slimeball, and there's strong steady support from Michael Peña as a disarmed and disgraced FBI rookie who doggedly stays on the hunt and, alone among his colleagues, gets a clue. Danny Glover, Kate Mara, Elias Koteas. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd