The Marksman sounded good.But the results are less-than great.It concerns Wesley Snipes in the title role who "paints"(marks)enemy targets so they can be destroyed by air strikes.On one such mission involving a foreign Nucler plant that goes awry.Can Wesley save the Day?The better question is why Seagal is not in this?

What we get is a routine actioner full of so many clichés that it could fill 100 DTV action films.Aside from a couple of scenes,and a genuine twist near the middle;It is totally boring 98 percent of the time.Devoid of any real good build-up or action sequences whatsoever. The movie also reeks of stock movie footage that has been culled from better movies.Even what looks to be Snipes 1994 actioner Drop Zone.Did I also mention NO martial arts throw-downs?

Acting-wise Snipes looks totally uninterested or Bored.He barely speaks and shows zero Charisma that made him a star.Dynasty alum Emma Samms pops up as an Ex-lover/suit.She still looks pretty good,and could get a pilot on Upn instead of wasting her time with this dreck. Many other characters are introduced,poorly written,or disappear altogether that interest is hard to sustain.

I am sure Snipes just took a check.And there is nothing wrong about that.But he should get out now to save his actors cred instead of wasting his time in this DTV wasteland.

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.

I watched this film of an evening and had forgotten about it the next morning. Cookie cutter is the phrase I'm looking for, because this straight-to-video nonsense is predictable in every way and holds no character of its own. Now, I'm not too worried about the lacklustre story - action films don't NEED great stories, plenty do without - but the attempted flashy direction is really at fault here. Marcus Adams handled the dull demonic horror outing LONG TIME DEAD but he's certainly not cut out for the action genre.

Wesley Snipes is the star - Seagal or Van Damme could equally have played the part - and nobody bothers giving him a character, so he just wanders around and shoots bad guys in various badly-directed and poorly-edited clips. There's the usual round of betrayal and heroism, but the whole cast is extraneous, the villains caricatures and originality nowhere to be found. It's neither exciting nor thrilling, and the presence of William Hope (ALIENS) only serves to remind the viewer of what a decent action film should look like.