Sniper (1993)

Truly Dreadful Film

Let's be realistic.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Hardboiled veteran Marine sniper Tom Beckett (ably played with steely resolve by Tom Berenger) and eager, but inexperienced rookie marksman Richard Miller (a fine performance by Billy Zane) are assigned to pull off a difficult covert mission in which they must venture into the Central American jungle in order to assassinate a powerful rebel leader and his Columbian drug lord backer. Director Luis Llosa brings a commendable mean'n'lean sense of efficiency to the tight and gripping story: The quick pace rarely flags for a minute, the tone is appropriately tough and gritty, the tension builds quite nicely, the dense jungle locations are neatly taken advantage of, and the exciting action set pieces are staged with skill and flair. Moreover, the radical contrast between Beckett's tightlipped no-nonsense machismo and Miller's wide-eyed aiming to please naivete gives this picture extra substance and resonance while the theme on how being a sniper takes a heavy toll on one's soul and conscience provides a surprising amount of poignancy. Best of all, this film has a praiseworthy stripped-down simplicity to it that ensures that there's a refreshing dearth of both cornball humor and needless sappy sentiment. Both Bill Butler's sharp cinematography and Gary Chang's spare moody score are up to speed. An on the money movie.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett is a sniper stationed in Panama. Although skilled, he has lost several men under his command.Beckett is teamed up with a S.W.A.T. member named Miller, who has not earned any confirmed kills, to eliminate a top Panamanian rebel leader.Tensions emerge between the two on how to conduct the mission, coupled with running into numerous challenges during the mission.....If you were like me, a teenager seeing the trailer and that scene where the bullet goes through the scope and kills the opposing Sniper, you had to see this film.Over twenty years on, it's just Billy Zane going all Dead Calm toward the end, and almost giving away their cover every two minutes.Sniper is a film that the title alone would sell to a market. We all love those parts in action films where we see someone getting taken out from a long distance, and when we play Call Of Duty, the sniper parts are the best.But this is where the film fails, it's like watching someone playing a really bland video game, and they are insisting that they watch the in game scenes because they really add something to the film.Brenger is okay, as is Zane, but we've seen this done before a thousand times.And even if that bit with the scope still impresses today, it does not justify a film.Let alone four sequels.

A jungle setting is the backdrop here as the "Heroes", one a lifer snipe with 300 confirmed kills and the other is a rookie with a fetish for bulls eye targets and not filthy foreign flesh. This, of course, sets off a chain reaction of a love-hate relationship in the middle of a deadly assassination assault.Both characters have moments of believability with Tom Berenger almost always assuring, but is haunted by his key-chain mementos of fallen fellow soldiers. Billy Zane is convincing as a whiny, reluctant participant that enters into a "Baptism of Fire" and becomes a convert.This is a somewhat inconsistent and incoherent insight into the mind and soul of the Military's role in global affairs and the personnel it trains and positions in ambiguous assignments where the motivations of the soldiers are "ours is not to wonder why...". Political and moral considerations aside, this can be enjoyed by the action and military fans that want their fiction to rely on psychology as much as patriotism. It is an engaging outing, if dense and heavy handed at times.

Best acting rendered by Tom Berenger.Billy Zane,otherwise commendable for dramatic adventure performances in Memphis Belle (1993) and The Phantom (1996),fails to make believable his character's see-sawing,erratic personality (how has he been chosen as a National Security Council operative for a top-ranking killing mission in the Panamanian outback, with only an office background?).The build-up is interesting enough,though the junior marksman played by Zane is deeply fear-stricken to begin with and later on at best irresponsibly indecisive while unbelievably careless,grouchy and childishly arrogant in his goings-on in the jungle,with the murderous streak suddenly developed against his senior partner toward the end of the story seeming very far-fetched,in view of the fact that the baddies are a mere stone's throw away and closing in,so you would not think anyone in that situation would care to consider erasing the only person on his side,not at least until after they had succeeded in escaping and certainly not in the middle of the bullet-ridden mêlée.Berenger looks and acts the part he plays,as a professional military man with all the trappings of a skilled specialist,bare of conceit,plus a moral streak(in jumping to the occasion of wiping out two evildoers rather than just one).The film's unsurprising ending -the junior marksman growing up to become a man- can be discounted by the audience: nothing to remain in the viewer's memory -certainly nothing as Sgt. Croft's unexpected demise towards the end of Raoul Walsh's 1958 film "The Naked and the Dead"-.