Every once in a while, a low-budget action film surprises audiences with unexpectedly exciting thrills. Unfortunately, “Seven Snipers” isn’t that movie. The Australian action film’s plot is simple: a retired sniper lives in peaceful isolation in the bush with her daughter when a vengeful villain from her past reemerges, threatening to take all she has. While the concept has potential, it suffers from an extremely thin plot, a lack of characterization, and repetitive sniping sequences that lack any unique ingenuity.
The film opens with the retired sniper Kris Hendricks (Radha Mitchell) giving her daughter Anja (Annabel Wolfe) some archery tips. When Anja goes to school, Kris gets an unexpected visitor. He claims to be representing an agricultural company that is interested in buying her land. Kris, suspicious of this stranger, responds by shooting at his car as he drives away. When Kris catches up with him and aims her rifle at his head, he ominously tells her, “He’s coming, Voodoo Child. Long live The Dragon.” Kris, who had the callsign Voodoo Child in her sniper days, gasps in fear and shoots the man.
A Misleading Title
Dreading the severity of this warning, Kris immediately calls her former squad of snipers for protection for both her and her daughter from the imminent threat of The Dragon. Kris’s contact, White Dog (Damien Ryan), is able to bring a total of five snipers including himself for reinforcements. They have varying degrees of combat experience and willingness to help, but they are all Kris has on her side. The Dragon (Tim Roth) remains hidden in a ghillie suit, taking out snipers and innocents left and right with unmatched sharpshooting accuracy. The Dragon, for reasons not yet explained, is after Kris’s daughter Anja, and he plans on killing everyone on the property until he leaves with her.
The plot of the film is quite simple, but it is a let-down from the advertised premise. The title, “Seven Snipers,” and the associated marketing material give the impression that the film would feature seven impeccable snipers battling with each other through creative and innovative methods. However, it is immediately clear that there are only two real snipers in the film, Kris and The Dragon. The other five are inept bullet fodder that stand in front of windows, walk around an illuminated house at night, and run in broad daylight in an open field. Five bad snipers aside, the two good ones are proper action badasses. Kris is a convincing stoic veteran with baggage and The Dragon is a perfectly menacing and calculating warlord. Nonetheless, the ease with which The Dragon renders the incompetent reinforcements useless quickly deflates any momentum the film gains from its setup.
Thin Plotting but Decent Character Arcs
A successful action film typically features novelty and ingenuity in how battles are executed. “Seven Snipers,” contrarily, suffers from highly-repetitive sniping sequences. This means one of two things: either dizzying, sweeping scope shots with little payoff, or characters getting shot by The Dragon’s off-screen sniping. To the film’s detriment, viewing the Australian landscape through a shaky telescopic sight is not all that exciting when there’s so little payoff. Additionally, while the film demonstrates the tactical skill of The Dragon by how easily he can shoot his opponents at significant range, it gets old fast. The first kill is very unpredictable, but each additional shot from him follows a tired pattern where a character gets a bullet in them from some great unseen distance. The idea of many snipers battling has potential, but it would require novelty and ingenuity for it to work, not the same kill over and over again.
Despite the thin plot, there is a discernible character arc for Kris. The Dragon reemerging into her life gives her an opportunity to face her trauma head-on. Unable to cope with the baggage of the horrific ordeal she survived, Kris had previously withdrawn and distanced herself emotionally from her daughter. In confronting her past, she is given the opportunity to heal and to have a new future with her daughter, if she can survive the assault from The Dragon. While effective, the main problem with this arc is that the characterization primarily happens in the final act. It comes off as too little too late, unable to compensate for the utter lack of characterization in the first half of the film.
In close, while “Seven Snipers” delivers some exciting moments, it largely is unable to overcome its repetitive elements, thin plot, lack of characterization. The concept of seven deadly marksmen armed with rifles and vengeance has so much potential, but the film never finds a creative way to execute it.
“Seven Snipers” is now streaming on Prime Video.
