Last Thursday I was running on something less than steam. I had had three hours of sleep, had blearily stumbled through a test that morning and had been asked if the rings under my eyes were from the end of some bruiser;s fist. I was beat. So I decided to go and see Shooter to relieve some stress. The short version of the plot is that Mark Wahlberg has a gun and he’s not afraid to use it.

Now, this is not the kind of movie I go to and expect greatness. I’d keep a tally of the explosions, grunt in affirmation of the body count, and in all likelihood give it an average-to-low rating. To my utter surprise, I rather enjoyed the movie’s sheer lunacy and disregard for human life. And in picking my brain, I realized that along the way the audience had been a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ in the classic Southern, badass-with-a-gun, tradition. The least funny situations, such as a man having his arm blown off, suddenly became an exercise in utter hilarity. I even started a round of applause when the female lead pulled a shotgun out and blew a hole in a man’s chest.

And over the years, I’ve begun to consider the audience as part of the experience. Not essential, but your audience can change how you enjoy a film. There’s something special about sharing that experience on a communal level.

We all have a memory like that, I remember the infamous Yoda sequence in Star Wars: Episode II, where the perpetually-hunched Jedi master opens his cloak, revealing a pint-sized lightsaber, allowing him excuse to propel himself into the air for thirty seconds of acrobatic glory. The image is burned into my retinas, but I also remember people standing up and cheering, men swinging their arms in circles and digging deep into their guts to howl. Women with smiles and giddy motions that seemed as if they were caught up in a whirlwind of simply wonderful things. Movies are an institution, and that, was a genuine experience.

Now, we all have bad experiences with audiences, and if you’re around my age you’re probably causing the majority of them. But there’s always been the people in front who won’t stop chatting, the kid behind you whose painted a mental bull’s-eye on your chair, the crying babies in an R-rated horror film. Even little things like the stranger next to you having the audacity to take ownership of one of your precious armrests.

When I think about the movie-going experience, I generally concern myself with the how, who, with and what snacks. Upon actually entering the theater, however, I, like many others, tend to let the movie handle the rest. It’s the film’s responsibility to produce entertainment for the next 120-some-odd-minutes, no further thought is necessary.

This audience didn’t make Shooter more than what it was, it was still bad, but it allowed me to step slightly off my critical reviewer high horse and have a good time. It’s not that, as a reviewer, I don’t have fun. Even with a bad movie, I love and regularly enjoy my job, and no one loves a good action movie like Terminator, Lethal Weapon or the Chronicles of Riddick more than I do. For preference, there are films with the requisite fun factor that I can be moved by its drama, all the while watching Gandalf fighting off the Balrog with his sword, Foe-hammer, as he plummets down into the depths of a mountain.

While film has always been a good escape for me, sometimes you need to walk into a film like Shooter or 300 with a group of like-minded intellectuals, and just make a fool of yourself in the act of having a good time. Enjoying films can’t happen without a group of people to do the enjoying, that’s where you come in.