Watching Tom Berenger armying around in the jungle really gives me some fond memories. Although Sniper was released only 7 years after platoon, in 1993, I have only just made my way into checking out this movie which as of 2011 has become a 4 film franchise. My expectations were neither high or low with this one, I love war movies and it’d have to be a complete bomb for me to not get at least a couple of enjoyable scenes out of it. The plot while not exactly original was decent enough, straight forward and pretty generic for this kind of thing, but plotting isn’t where I usually put my focus in an action movie, especially one called Sniper starring Tom Berenger and made in 1993. I was expecting Snipery style tension, action, and cool head shots! Did it deliver, it sure did! But what it made up for in decent action it certainly lacked in finesse.Tom Berenger plays a veteran sniper who has spent most of his military career alone (or occasionally with his spotter) in the jungle. His current spotter is killed at the beginning of the movie by a rogue sniper, he blames the evac team for showing up in daylight when he asked for a night extraction, and I could see his point. If I was a sniper who asked for a night extraction and they showed up in daylight and my buddy got killed because of it, I’d be pretty pissed off too. We get introduced to Berenger’s new partner played by Billy Zane with hair during the films main mission briefing/exposition. Zane plays a SWAT sharpshooter who doesn’t have a single recorded kill in the field, but is given orders to act as Berenger’s spotter and to see that he carries his mission through. They have to kill some foreign army general that is being sworn in to power under financing from a drug lord, so the guy’s gotta go. Zane is also told on his way out, that if Berenger becomes a liability during the mission, its Zane’s job to “solve the problem”.
I loved the fact that Sniper really worked on its fundamental elements, whether the makers succeeded is completely subjective, but keeping a simple plot, working on some decent and identifiable characters whilst keeping the action and character conflict well balanced with the films “downtime” it clearly makes the movie seem like the director cared about what he was doing. He really tried to make a good movie, and did a pretty ok job.
That doesn’t mean Sniper doesn’t have its flaws. The dialogue is a crappy at times, the reason I think this is because the actors sound like “actors delivering lines”, but Tom Berenger is a top notch actor and he doesn’t let the dialogue bring him down too much, like crap cheesy dialog can quite easily do to some actors. Zane doesn’t quite hold up with this, he’s ok, but he doesn’t quite hit the mark like Berenger in terms of his performance. Their relationship though, it served the movie well, I’ve seen the same relationship between two characters on film a hundred times, the seasoned veteran, the rookie soldier, although Zane comes from SWAT so he was technically just from a different line of specialty.
Sniper has some tense moments. I liked how the camera worked with this, often composing the actors to allow the camera to move and drive a scenario into something else. One of my favorite parts of the film had Tom Berenger in his full ghille suit getup, complete with full grass cammo overlay, lying completely obscured in the middle of a dried out grassy field, Zane wasn’t so well hidden, hiding in a shack over-looking said field. The movie plays on Zane’s lack of a killing record, and when Berenger learns he failed to kill a target he’d asked him to kill early on in the movie, (the guy turns back up whilst they are in these positions), This makes Berenger angry so he announces his disapproval at Zane who he knows can see him through his scope, essentially they’re having an argument via sniper rifle scope whilst waiting to take out their targets. Pretty cool. There’s a lot of slo-mo kills, which I thought looked a little light on the impact of the kills, but the shots kind of made them work well enough.
The sniping team not only at war with each other, are up against another Sniper who knows they’re here. This is the dude that killed Berengers spotter at the beginning, throw on top of this situation the general and his henchman, there’s problems coming from all directions in this movie. We get some great Sniper vs. Sniper action, Sniper vs. multiple infantrymen, Sniper vs. un-suspecting victim, Sniper vs. Spotter and some good old hand to hand combat just to keep things on their toes.
So this movie actually did have a couple of intense Sniping scenes! I couldn’t remember ever being hooked by a “nothing” combat situation as I was during the Ralph Fiennes scene in The Hurt Locker, if you consider that top of the bar “nothing combat” tense, which you may not but it’s the best example I can think of, then Sniper doesn’t come close, but it keeps it interesting, some pretty cool shots give it an edge when it was time to sneak up or stand watch, but the films lack of positional sense occasionally threw me, and with it, the tension it had built. The scene when Berenger confronts the rogue sniper, who turns out to be some Jesse Ventura looking nobody, he manages to distract the guy with a knife dangling from string, next to the guy, but berenger is far enough away to take him out with his Sniper rifle. A little confusing, and noticing this kind of shit does dumb it down a little, but it’s forgivable.
The movie is set in the Panamian jungle, however it was all shot on location in Australia. I couldn’t help but feel the nostalgia of the jungle setting, although Sniper is a fair few years old, it’s not a regular thing nowadays to get new jungle based warfare movie, Herzog’s ‘Rescue Dawn’ was a top movie and a welcome change to the war on terror third world desert set flicks. I suppose Predators could be up there as well, Vietcong or alien creatures, if it’s in a jungle, and you can kill it, it’s alright by me!
