- Title: Seven Snipers
- IMDb: link
Radha Mitchell stars as a retired Special Forces sniper living in the remote Australian countryside with her rebellious teenage daughter (Annabel Wolfe). The serenity of their isolated life is interrupted when an agent of an old enemy locates the former sniper and alerts his boss, a mad warlord (Tim Roth), to their location. The result is a solid, although not overly ambitious, thriller.
Calling in old debts, our heroine manages to assemble a small number of snipers (most notably Ioan Gruffudd) to try and protect her home from the oncoming “Dragon.” A straightforward tale, the film builds up Robbins’ character long before we ever see the Dragon in action, both in how Mitchell’s character fears him and the disbelief we see in her reinforcements once they discover who they are protecting her from.
Making all the characters snipers, with our baddie (rather than protagonist) being unquestionably the best of the bunch, Andrew O’Keefe‘s script gives the film a slightly different slant than the usual genre picture involving a former solider woken from slumber and forced back into the fight. Our Dragon, ego in full bloom, deciding to arrive alone for his retribution (rather than with dozens of soldiers) is what gives the snipers a fighting chance.
Shot almost entirely is a single location, the home and surrounding fields, you feel a bit of a financial strain to Seven Snipers, but director Sandra Sciberras does the best with what she has to work with keeping the story of revenge and retribution short and sweet with a running time under 90 minutes that prevents us from getting tired of the tale or give the audience too much time to poke holes in the logic of how events play out.
