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At one point, Matt Damon was expected to be in the film, but his schedule is so full that filming would have had to be delayed until late next year. And in any case, he's going to be busy, starring in Paul Greengrass's movie Imperial Life In The Emerald City, based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's hard-hitting book about how the U.S. messed up its occupation of Baghdad.
Plus, he'll have his hands full launching Oceans 13 at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
"All I wanted was to play English and Matt wants to play Australian, yet the best roles we've gotten were playing guys from Boston - The Perfect Storm and The Departed for me and Good Will Hunting and The Departed for him; so we both said, 'What the f*** are we doing?' We're wasting all this time, man. We'd better just embrace it.'"
Wahlberg can laugh now. "But it wasn't just Marty. The whole time I was in the character so I was mad at everybody. It was Leo [DiCaprio], Matt [Damon] and Jack [Nicholson]. F*** Jack, too."
"It's cool for a minute to see these guys living the high life. But come on, you don't want to see that for so long. I remember hearing the cast of Ocean's 12 talking about how much fun they were having. I don't want to hear that, a bunch of rich people having a good time while everybody else is living in the real world. The more crap that they have to deal with, the happier I am."
St Louis Today
Although "Shooter" is based on a book by Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, its true inspiration seems to be the series of espionage films starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. If Bourne dispensed with the deep thoughts and simply came out shooting, he'd be Swagger.
New York Sun
"Shooter" is an abnormally outspoken example of its genre, but otherwise it's an old-fashioned action movie. That is to say, it's really dumb. Remember a few years ago, when Matt Damon's brisk "Bourne" thrillers made the viewer play catch-up? They managed to convey that certain CIA higher-ups had gone rotten without having them bellow it into the camera. They acknowledged that some of us who like to watch gunfights and car chases do in fact have brains. The Bourne pictures may even have gotten some people saying that a new batch of sophisticated action flicks was on the way. At times, "Shooter" seems to have been made specifically to shut those people up.
Weekly Dig
Wahlberg seems as one-dimensional as a photograph, with all the emotional range of a lawn gnome.
Matt Damon, who plays a teacher in "Margaret," patiently signed several autographs at 76th St. and Second Ave. yesterday for a Wagner Middle School seventh-grader, who no doubt got brownie points by giving them to his teachers.
