by Adrian Nguyen
Worth: $7.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Radha Mitchell, Tim Roth, Ioan Gruffudd, Ryan Kwanten
Intro:
… disposable and weightless film … an action sequence that doesn’t have a beginning, nor a coda. Once the massacre is over, it stops, leaving no room for any conclusive impact.
Seven Snipers is a cat-and-mouse B-thriller that follows a retired master sniper who has to protect her daughter at her ranch from a warlord named The Dragon, who is played with frightening grit by Tim Roth. Backing her up is her old team of elite killers, whom The Dragon will have to take down one by one. And that’s pretty much it.
Almost all of the characters, except for the lead Kris Hendricks (Radha Mitchell) and The Dragon, are paper-thin. Seven Snipers is a checklist of action movie cliches, from the retired hero living with their family, isolated to the world, to the flashback that reveals why they left their deadly profession in the first place, all the way down to the stilted one-liners and snarky sidekicks.
The entire film is shot as a briskly paced action sequence with wide angles of Australia’s landscape bookending. The snipers have a screen presence, but they have little meaning, nor do the sequences featuring weapons, which are meant to build tension. We are told that there’s a threat, which creates an expectation, but nothing we have not seen in dozens of other movies is provided to satisfy our curiosity. That would not be too big a problem in such a well-worn genre, if only it were competently made. There are obvious errors in the editing, derived from haphazard cutting, and the audio mix is often muddy.
Seven Snipers promises an intense thriller like Sisu or an eye-opening character study like American Sniper. Undercut by Sandra Sciberras’s undercooked direction and Andrew O’Keefe’s uneven screenplay, the resulting disposable and weightless film is an action sequence that doesn’t have a beginning, nor a coda. Once the massacre is over, it stops, leaving no room for any conclusive impact.
