SPOILER-FREE PLOT SUMMARY
Retired soldier Kris Hendricks (played by Radha Mitchell) is raising her teenage daughter Anja (Annabel Wolfe) on a remote Australian farm when she’s randomly visited by a suspicious man in a truck. He utters the phrase “Long live The Dragon” and she realizes an old rebel warlord once thought dead (Tim Roth) is still alive and coming to exact his revenge. She immediately starts packing up and calls to get her daughter out of high school only to learn that Anja hasn’t been to school in weeks. Desperate to locate her and stave off the incoming threat, she calls in a favor and multiple mercenaries show up via helicopter. The Dragon starts to pick them off one-by-one in an attempt to get to Hendricks and reveal a truth that’s been kept secret for over a decade.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Let’s start with the positives. This movie is intense. SEVEN SNIPERS grabs ahold of you and hangs on relentlessly. Despite a ton — and I do mean a ton — of scope POV shots, there’s rarely a time the audience has a chance to breathe without at least some level of anticipation.
Performance-wise, Mitchell is committed, Wolfe is a discovery and Roth is solid with what he’s given. Even the supporting cast members do their jobs with nobody feeling like dead weight which, in an action flick like this, isn’t always the case.
That said, it seems like any competent actor could’ve played Roth’s part. He’s great, per usual, but the villain role here is hardly dependent on him specifically. Perhaps the audience would’ve been better served with a fresh face as opposed to being excited to see Roth only to realize he’s not given much to work with.
Between the mercenary who appears to desert the team but doesn’t, characters leaving the safety of the house only to stand out in the open and sharpshooters capping off people from long distances yet missing conveniently when the story needs to continue, SEVEN SNIPERS has a lot of curious choices.
If you’re the warlord, why send someone ahead of you as a calling card? If you’re the daughter who’s never witnessed a killing before, why are you choosing now to complain that your mom was gone too much? And, if you’re the mercenary who’s genuinely scared for your life, why would you attempt to run away into the kill zone? We don’t know why yet every one of these (and more) happen.
Because it has a great premise, because the acting is solid and because it’s so intense, SEVEN SNIPERS begs for a higher score. But, in the end, there were far too many confusing and curious elements to ignore. If you like military-themed action movies, this is worth your time. But, when you start scratching your head throughout the last half, don’t say you weren’t warned.
JKG SCORE: 5.5 out of 10
Untitled Film Project 