Regardless of your stance of the bewildering longevity of the the Sniper franchise, you have to give Tom Berenger all the props in the world to align himself with the only action franchise to allow him to spend entire setpieces lying down. Even so, there’s still something inherently tense about the nature of the type of soldier who separates himself from the team to stake out and kill selected targets; but while the concept of the sniper is practically perfect for a military based thriller, with all of its drawn out silences and agonisingly nail biting instances of two men stalking each other silently through a warzone in primeval game of hide and seek, could it possibly hope to maintain a sequel, let alone a franchise?
Well, Berenger certainly hoped so, and so did director Craig R. Baxley, whose normal stock in trade usually involved underrated action flicks with far less subtlety. The road to Sniper getting a confounding eleven installments starts here, can it draw a bead on success?
We catch up with former U.S. Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance Scout Sniper Thomas
Beckett after he’s scratching out a living after bring discharged thanks to now being down to nine fingers. However, despite his job of leading trigger happy fat cats on hunting excursions, and being limited if he wants to learn the piano, he’s managed to keep up his uncanny ability to lodge a bullet in the brain pan of a target, thousands of meters away.
You can imagine that he’s not entirely shocked then when a CIA officer and a Colonal approach him with an offer to jump back into the life once again if he’s willing to head into Serbia and punch the ticket of a rogue general whose favorite hobbies is ordering acts of genocide in Muslim populated areas.
Knowing that this is essentially a glorified suicide mission, Beckett agrees purely to get himself reinstated as a Marine and demands that he accompanied by a spotter. Enter Jake Cole, an experienced marksman in his own right who is on death row for killing a federal officer – which lends even more credence to Beckett’s theory that survival will be slimmer than Jessica Rabbit’s waistline.
Upon arriving in Serbia, both Beckett and Cole storm up an uneasy, fairly hostile rapport as they head to meet Sophia, the representative of an extraordinarily limited resistance, and after getting the necessary intelligence from her, the boys go to work. However, after giving their target an extra opening in his body from multiple blocks away and fighting to evade the police, things start to go wrong – or they continue to go right depending on what parts of the mission you are actually privy to. Beckett was under the impression that all they had to do was to shoot a murderous colonal, but it turns out that it was only stage one of a multi-staged mission that gets all the more deadly the more complex it gets.
I’ve actually been something of an admirer of the works of Craig R. Baxley for a while. Even though his modest collection of action flick might not be regarded as absolute classics compared to other, similarly bombastic movies, titles such as Action Jackson, Dark Angel and the gloriously over the top Stone Cold prove that he was a cult director that knew how to righteously fuck shit up. However, with Sniper 2, the guy who gave us the sight of Carl Weathers driving a car up someone’s stairs and Dolph Lundgren trading blows with an albino alien drug dealer would have to tone the more hyperbolic traits of his style a little as sniping a guy proves to be exponentially harder if you’re blowing up large amounts of the neighbourhood. Thus Baxley may deliver a more buttoned down movie than some of the other ones I’ve mentioned, but it still manages to live up the the first film’s legacy even if it came along nine years later.
To be honest, even though the first film certainly had its moments, it wasn’t exactly the standout action product of the 80s and rather fittingly, it’s made-for-television heritage isn’t particularly a hidden wonder either – but like the first film and its director, Luis Llosa, Baxley still manages to deliver just enough nifty sniping sequences and a bit of explodey action to be worth a watch. Helping greatly is the return of Tom Berenger who makes the belated reintroduction of his disgruntled soldier into a crotchety veteran seem pretty smooth. In fact, the actor seems to be thriving on playing a man so initially disinterested in virtually everybody and everything about him, he make nihilism seem like a weekend on ecstasy in comparison.
Of course, Billy Zane couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make the party, so instead we get Bokeem Woodbine playing the younger spotter who inevitably clashes/bonds with his older, crabbier, teammate. While Woodbine is most definitely in early 2000s, made-for-tv mode here, I’ve always considered him a highly underrated actor and watching his gravelly voice butt heads with Berenger fully in grumpy old sod mode, they make a decent double act.
The plot obviously thinks that it’s got an ace in the hole with it’s multi-layered mission that reveals that there’s more to the gig that Beckett originally thought, but when the people asking you to go to some godforsaken place to kill a man are played by Johhny Cage from the 90s Mortal Kombat movie and Bulldog from Fraiser, surely you should gave expected at least some shenanigans, right? Although while its hard to care about the ever evolving mission, Baxley manages to tease out some memorable action sequences for his made-for-tv budget. A moment where Beckett decides to smash through a police blockade using a tram may oversell the battering ram capabilities of Serbian public transport, but it looks fucking cool as apparently every car in the country has a habit of destination on impact like it’s glove compartment has been packed with C4. Elsewhere, a climactic game of cat and mouse involving Beckett hunting an enemy sniper through a ruined town may lack the intimacy of, say, Enemy At The Gates, it’s still a cool sniper sequences that’s made all the more memorable by it’s striking backdrop that swaps out steaming jungles for hollowed out towns.
Still, some flashier bullseyes wouldn’t have gone amiss and the resistance subplot feels a little undercooked, but if the prevailing image of the newly minted franchise is featuring Berenger in the foulest mood you could imagine before putting down despotic villains on foreign soil, then I guess it’s fair to say that Sniper 2 nails it right between the eyes.
You’ll forget almost every part of it the second it ends, but for decent quality thrills on a low quality budget, Sniper 2 could be a lot worse than what Baxley has given us. But just imagine what the director could have done if someone that thought to flick the safety to off and filled the chamber with way more expensive rounds.
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