Sniper (1993) – Review

Cinema has always been stuffed full of ironies, but one of my favorite is that Sniper, a movie about the stealthiest of military professions, somehow managed to secure itself a franchise with no less than eleven entries without anybody noticing whatsoever. That’s right, that little war/action movie that saw Tom Berenger and Billy Zane as bickering marksmen stuck in the middle of a mission in Panama manage to squeeze out ten little follow ups like a pregnant rabbit popping out babies – and until recently, I didn’t even know that the bulk of them even existed.
Still, we all have to start somewhere and what better way to do that than with Luis Llosa’s solid original that boldly tried to make an action movie about people sitting really still for hours.
High powered rifles, high stakes missions, ego bruising clashes and a lot of whizzing bullets means that this rumble in the jungle has the potential, but can it lay its crosshairs on its target long enough to pull the trigger on success?

Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett pretty much encapsulates what everyone’s idea of a typical sniper is. Moody, solitary, loaded with personal demons and tougher than a two dollar steak, he also has a confirmed kill count in the mid seventies and his stern demeanour certainly doesn’t lift much after he experiences a fatal disaster in the field. After assassinating a Panamanian rebel leader with his usual flair, Beckett and his spotter, Corporal Papich, have their locations given away when their evac chopper arrives two hours early thus meaning they have to try and escape under cover of daylight. While Beckett escapes unscathed, Papich fatally takes two bullets for his troubles and the death of the young man somehow manages to make the grizzled sniper even more resistant to company.
Enter Richard Miller, Olympic medal winner and former SWAT sharpshooter, who is given a mission to team up with Beckett and head back into the Panama jungle to take out another rebel General and the Colombian drug lord who is funding him; but not only is Miller hideously unexperienced for this mission, the job is so vital that he also has orders to kill Beckett if the notorious misanthrope attempts to undermine the mission in any way. Also playing on Miller’s mind as he enters the jungle with his new partner is the fact that a rumour is going around that his sharpshooting prowess managed to nab himself an impossible shot that saw him pick off a sniper from a moving helicopter. However, this proves to be about as accurate as the promises made in a party political broadcast and it isn’t long before Beckett starts changing the mission on the fly to test his new partner.
Pressure grows, tempers flare and Miller is put into even more awkward positions when Beckett starts adding more targets to their kill list – can the two shooters possibly hope to coexist in order to put their bullets where they belong, or will they put them in each other instead?

When it comes to 90s action movies set in the military, they don’t come much more solid than the original Sniper and much like the deadly operative itself, it pains itself by setting everything up neatly before lining up for a kill shot. It may not be the most accomplished action/thrillers ever devised, but for the most part, Llosa strives to try and make us feel the stickiness of the jungle and the macho tension between the leads that’s so thick it could probably stop a bullet better than kevlar. It’s main strength is that it attempts to be the inverse of a more typical jungle set bullet sprayer and while other movies, such as Rambo: First Blood Part 2, would race to the next sweaty action scene as fast as it could, Sniper tries to have a bit more patience than that. So while Stallone or Schwarzenegger would be rampaging their way through a laundry list of stuntmen, as quick as they possibly could, Berenger and Zane hold off, lurking in swamps, squatting in bushes and laying in fields wrapped in grassy chamoe suits waiting for that perfect moment. It’s a bold move and it’s a fairly fresh feeling concept – especially for a flick that feels noticeably more like a product from the eighties despite coming out in 93 – but Llosa ensures that the film isn’t just 90 solid minutes of a static Tom Berenger glaring through a scope. In fact, at times, Sniper feels like the first twenty minutes of Predator (you know, the bits without the Predator in it), just without the pizzazz that John McTiernan and it’s not surprise that Luis Llosa returned to the jungle for a different type of killer with slithering B-movie blowout, Anaconda.

The film opens with the requisite botched mission which helps us acclimate to the world weary Beckett who, after decades of picking off targets for his government, has seen his soul whither into a hard shell – although, seeing Berenger’s name on the credits should be warning enough seeing as he was hardly known for playing rosy rays of sunshine. In fact, the last time I saw him in the jungle, he was playing the terrifying Sergeant Barnes in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, although he’s chilled out a little since then… Still, the opening scene is something of a perfect statement of intent for the rest of the movie as it delivers old school blood squibs and the odd directorial florish of side on shots of bullets fizzing through the air, to deliver tangible action.
Similarly, Billy Zane’s brattish Miller gets his own, bloody intro as the act of taking credit for an audacious kill immediately marks him as quite a sizable arsehole who will undoubtedly knock skulls with his new, grizzled partner. However, if I’m being truly honest with you, while watching Berenger drag an insolent Zane through some intriguing, on the job, sniper training (sleeping half submerged in a river in order to avoid detection is a new on me) is rightfully gripping, the fireworks between the two just didn’t contain the explosives necessary to blow my hat off. Berenger is as hard-assed as they come and Zane can play oily prick in his sleep, but even though their differences eventually have them stalking each other through the jungle at some point, their hatred and subsequent resolution doesn’t feel quite as earned as they could have.
However, for a film named Sniper, it certainly does the business of taking out a bad guy from a long way out justice. Detailing it as a harrowing, nomadic lifestyle compared to the comradery usually seen with military units, Llosa positively trips over himself to stage as many tense squinting scenes as he possibly can as a blissfully clueless victim has a crosshairs zero in on their chest. He’s also having fun with the abnormal patience required to do such a painstaking job as one memorable moment has Berenger lying undetected in full view of the villain’s hacienda for a full day while Zane grumbles way in a nearby shed.

Hardly on the cusp of cutting edge, 90s action, Sniper is nevertheless an economical bullet flinger that tries to do something a little different with cinematic jungle warfare other than falling back on the same old one-man army shtick. However, when it comes to throwaway, old school action, Sniper, locks and loads far better than you’d think.
Worth a shot.
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