Limited Scope: Not quite magnificent SEVEN SNIPERS is by the numbers thriller…
After a long, impressive but weathering career in the military, Kris Hendricks has left her days as a sniper behind her, but living with her daughter in a remote home in Australia, she’s always been aware her past could find her.
Suspicious of strangers, she’s armed and ready for any threat. But when the age-old bounty on her head appears to encourage an unwelcome visitor, she also finds out that the warlord she encountered decades before may have finally tracked her down. Realising the stakes, she calls in a favour from an old comrade, but can the team of fellow snipers who turn up to protect her (and themselves), survive a battlefield legend?
More than simple revenge, ‘The Dragon’ has come to claim something that he thinks belong to him and he’s willing and able to take out anyone who gets in his way…
*some spoilers*
Seven Snipers is, irony fully intact, a wholly by-the-numbers outing that scores a predictable rating out of ten. That’s not to say it’s not a short and sweet time-killer and at just less than an hour-and-a-half it’s a compact and bijou entry into the ‘siege’ sub-category. There’s nothing remarkable here and it’s the sort of story that could have been easily generated by a ChatGPT prompt, but there’s some decent names attached. The characters are fairly thin off the page – given some history and motivations and portrayed well enough by capable actors, but which could just as well be explained in bullet-points and cliff-notes.
That’s the short review. The longer should, at least, praise the cast for fully committing to proceedings.
Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black) is good as the pragmatic mother, Kris Hendricks, who is skilled in combat but less adept at parenting, single or otherwise. She wants to believe that she’s left the military-life behind, especially after we begin to see what she experienced towards the end of her time in the forces and what it cost her. But despite what we’re shown (and what we likely guess long before the film reveals it), it’s quite superficially laid down. The first half of the film establishes her current status-quo pragmatism and strategy (rightly suspicious of strangers) and she has an armoury of guns in case of emergency. There’s early attempts to ground her as far from a superhero and more of a deadly pragmatist, but they are quickly swallowed by movie conventions. And, yes, her home is the only one for miles, but for someone who is supposed to have been one of the best snipers around, the wide expanse beyond also includes quite a lot of undergrowth, tree-lines and shrubbery that would surely obscure the incoming threats she imagines as just being over the brow of any hill.
Tim Roth is always watchable and the game-for-anything veteran elevates anything he’s in, but his role as ‘The Dragon’ requires very little more than turning up and looking down the scope. For the first half of the film, he barely utters a word, pressed deep into the long grasses and letting his rifle do the talking. But for a supposedly legendary warlord, discussed in hushed tones and believed/hoped to be dead, his antagonist is pretty bland once he gets more screentime and dialogue. Roth himself has an innate charisma and a rich history in mainstream and commercial fare as well as more subversive material, but here his character comes across as having an air of generic indifference rather than true menace. Again, we’re told, but don’t see enough to warrant the scale of the shock and awe. (The supposed war-torn flashbacks look like they were actually shot as an afterthought in an afternoon at a local park than an angst-filled compound). Roth’s is also a role where the character has to be ruthless in one scene and then deliberately lenient in others. No real spoilers, but there’s a scene where he could kill Kris very easily, but announces he wants to play ‘their game’, ensuring the age-old bad-guy trope of ‘should have just got on with it, but didn’t…‘.
Every furrow-browed mother needs a rebellious daughter and Annabel Wolfe is fine with what she’s given to do (essentially just be exactly that: rebellious… and be expert with Chekov’s bow and arrow). Anja is compelled to run off at inconvenient moments and extend the story and though she’s more than a damsel in distress, she’s also little more than the maguffin of the piece.
There may be seven snipers in the title, but that also seems rather arbitrary, especially with the speed that Roth’s Dragon goes through them, or rather his bullets do. Summoned back into action, Hendrick’s support troop are a father and son (Damien Ryan and Charles Cottier), a feisty woman (Bianca Wallace), Pacharo Mzembe as a recruit who realises what he’s about to get himself into and decides he was conned and decides to leave – smart guy – and Ioan Gruffudd the closest thing Kris has to a brotherly-battlefield partner (guess the order of potential demise). (Trivia note: Gruffudd and Wallace are now married in real life with a son).
You could have done the same story with, say, five soldiers or less – losing only the alliteration factor for the marketing. Real-life snipers, if and when they choose to give any details, have often said that there’s more time waiting alone for their moment than action films could ever devote to running-time. But this is the kind of film where things all too often zip around like a more conventional battlefield and the specific problem of actually having a team of snipers feels counter-intuitive to that description – it’s like having a team of expert goalies. Even with the normal suspension of disbelief that’s needed for such a movie, some of the character decisions are inconsistent. There’s nice moments where you think ‘That’s actually a decent strategy…‘ but others where plot demands peril and you think ‘Why would a veteran soldier make that kind of reckless mistake..?‘ There are some moments of consideration and maintaining position as they scope the area and field of threat, but it’s as if the film doesn’t want to go more than a few minutes without the crack of gunfire and paints the ‘heroes’ as more conventional soldiers playing a deadly game of tag.
Director Sandra Sciberras keeps things moving and makes the Australian scenery a nice backdrop – but it’s usually hard to go wrong with what nature provides for the lens. However, the film rarely feels geographically-grounded. Beyond a few outback comments and accents, this could just as well be a homestead in Montana, California or somewhere in Europe. There’s also some obvious post-production work that can pull you out of the moment – a car crashing and another engulfed in flames feel artificial and are obviously added after the fact.
Competent and fine but not memorable (except in the familiarity in conjures up), Seven Snipers is the kind of film that, back in the Before Times, would likely have gone straight to DVD – marketed around a couple of known stars on its sleeve or sitting next to a string of other similar videos on the shelves. There are worse fates.
But as sniper-scenarios go, this edition hits its target audience but misses the bullseye.
7/10
Seven Snipers is now available from Well Go USA Entertainment on several streaming platforms including Amazon Prime and iTunes…