Seven Snipers is currently available on VOD and arriving August 11th on Blu-ray from Well Go USA
Set in the Australian countryside Seven Snipers is an action thriller about Kris Hendricks (Radha Mitchell) codename Voodoo Child a former elite sniper living quietly off the grid raising her daughter until learning she is the target of the infamous “Dragon” (Tim Roth) a past rival she believed was long dead out for revenge. Out of concern for her and her daughter, Kris calls in a favor and enlists a team of mercenaries to help her make a stand against the lethal “ Dragon.”
The siege film genre was popularized by westerns like Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo where John Wayne and Dean Martin were forced to defend the jail from a ruthless gang out to free the imprisoned brother of the rancher they work for. However over the years it’s has proven flexible and easily adaptable to other genres and served as a great foundation for thrillers like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 or, more recently, Green Room. One of the greatest horror films ever made– George Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead– is a siege movie. Seven Snipers continues that tradition of genre bending by presenting a siege film through a horror movie lens. The film, despite being about snipers and mercenaries, leans more into the thriller and suspense elements. The action plays like a slasher movie where the killer wields a sniper rifle instead of a knife. There is no balletic shoot outs or dynamic gun fire. The kills are often sudden and brutal punctuations to tense standoffs or quiet moments. The “Dragon” (who is named after a monster) methodically works his way through the armed mercenaries picking them off one by one as if he were Michael Myers in his murderous quest to reach the final girl. There’s even ample amounts of “how badass is he” dialogue where various characters speak about the Dragon and his exploits as if he were the boogie man or a ghost whispered about among soldiers of fortune.
Radha Mitchell is great as the “secret badass” reluctantly called back into action and carries the movie well. While his presence is often felt but not seen Roth seems to be having fun as the evil Dragon and embraces the assignment. The rest of the cast is solid even if they are victims of the horror movie cliché of being underdeveloped characters that seem to only exist to contribute to the body count.
It is interesting to see how the horror- and slasher-coded touches frame the gun violence in a different light than you traditionally see in action films where guns and gun violence are often glamourized or celebrated. In Seven Snipers, the guns are cold and scary instruments of death and the violence is graphic and shocking. This framing underlines the movie’s central theme that the horrors of war are as haunting and inescapable as Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees and you can run from the monster but eventually you must confront the Dragon.
