In previous episodes of The Best Movie You Never Saw, I’ve talked a little bit about how much I like the eighties and nineties actor Tom Berenger. From Platoon through Shoot to Kill and The Substitute, he was a great character actor with some serious action chops. Were he to have come along in another era, he could have easily been an action star in the vein of Liam Neeson or Gerard Butler, but in his heyday, audiences seemed to prefer larger-than-life heroes. Yet, some of his movies proved to be modestly successful, and one of the more intruding examples is the 1993 movie Sniper, which is probably the best movie you ever saw that got nine sequels.
In it, Berenger plays Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett, a legendary sniper with many confirmed kills under his belt. His work nowadays is embroiled in the war on drugs, with him having a particular bone to pick with two former allies gone rogue. One is The Surgeon, an ex-CIA officer who works for Columbian drug lords as a torturer, while the other is DeSilva, a. Rebel sniper who was once Beckett’s protege. In the opening scenes, his spotter is killed. Soon after, Beckett is sent out again to assassinate a Panamanian Rebel Leader, General Miguel Alvarez, and his Columbian drug lord financier, Raoul Ochoa.
Complicating things is the fact that he has to bring a civilian who works for the CIA, Billy Zane’s Richard Miller, into the jungle with him to make sure the killings go according to plan. Miller is a sniper himself, being a former Olympic Medalist and Swat Team sharpshooter. Still, Beckett doesn’t realize until too late that Miller has no kills under his belt and doesn’t have the mental fortitude to complete the mission.
So, here’s what makes Sniper interesting. In your run-of-the-mill action movie, Zane’s Miller would have been one of two things – an innocent or a liability-turned-villain. The film flirts with the latter, with Miller going to pieces the more violent the mission gets. Still, in a change of pace, he eventually rises to the occasion when Beckett is captured, eventually becoming the film’s hero and earning Beckett’s respect and friendship – despite having tried to murder him earlier in the film.
Sniper comes from director Luis Llosa, and it proved to be his ticket to a significant Hollywood career. At the time, he was best known for having directed low-budget Roger Corman action movies and Sniper, despite being distributed by Sony, was an independent film., with a bargain basement budget of just over $5 million. It was shot in Australia and proved to be an inexpensive pick-up for Sony amid a rough run of films after the disastrous reign of Peter Guber and Jon Peters in the early nineties.
At the time, Berenger’s career was in a strange place. He ended the eighties on a high, with Platoon and the comedy Major League both gigantic hits. But the early nineties were rough for him, with the erotic thriller Shattered flopping at the box office, while his character-based turns in international films like The Field and At Play in the Fields of the Lord were barely seen in the U.S.
Sniper would trade on the notoriety of perhaps his most famous role, that of the brutal Staff Sergeant Barnes in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. But, while that battle-scarred veteran was depicted as a sadist, Sniper’s Beckett was a much more heroic military man. While an almost supernaturally gifted killer, he’s haunted by the fact that killing comes so easy to him, harbouring an elaborate fantasy about retiring to a place in Montana which is totally out of his reach. And, while he’s a killer, he has a moral code. He is especially bent on eliminating U.S.-trained professionals who’ve gone to work for the opposition – in this case, The Surgeon and DeSilva.
Sniper would also mark an early starring role for Billy Zane, who was best known then for his unhinged, villainous turn in the superb nautical thriller Dead Calm. Zane does an excellent job of humanizing the way out of his element Miller and boldly allows him to go full-on crazy before pulling back towards the end as he emerges a hero.
Like many cool nineties action movies, Sniper runs a taught ninety minutes and change and doesn’t waste a lot of time before plunging us into the action. The violence is hardcore, the characters are memorable, and the acting is solid.
It proved to be a decent hit for Sony, which released the movie during January dump month, which was known as a no-man’s land for movies back then. It made several times its budget back, just over $18 million, and it earned Llosa a high-profile follow-up, with him being chosen to direct the Sylvester Stallone/ Sharon Stone action flick The Specialist.
At the time, though, Sniper wasn’t seen as much more than a modest performer, although it did well on video. Here’s where the legacy of Sniper gets interesting. In the early 2000s, the DVD boom was MASSIVE, and suddenly, studios decided they would start churning out direct-to-video action movies, a genre they had previously turned up their noses at. Actors who had lost their cachet as action stars, such as Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes and Jean-Claude Van Damme, found a comfortable niche in this genre, and Columbia decided to exploit the home video success of Sniper by making Sniper 2 nine years after the original.
While low-budget, the studio was able to lure Tom Berenger back, as the actor’s career as a viable lead in theatrical films had tapered off by then. Sniper 2 was a surprise smash on DVD, with Berenger returning for Sniper 3 in 2004. At this point, the DVD boom came to an end, and the series went on hiatus, only to be resurrected once again by Sony with Sniper Reloaded, which centred around the son of Berenger’s character, played by Chad Michael Collins, who’s headlined all the subsequent films. They managed to get back Billy Zane to reprise his role as Miller, with him now a tenor-type figure, and Tom Berenger and Billy Zane seemed to trade off installments in the future, although they were both in Sniper: Ultimate Kill. The franchise has become a DTV staple for Sony and has been popular enough that a rip-off of Steven Seagal’s movie, Sniper: Special Ops, tried to pass itself off as an instalment in the franchise, but don’t be fooled.
In the end, the Sniper film series is an interesting phenomenon. Despite it’s status as a large obscure nineties action movie, thirty years later, the franchise it spawned is still going. Heck, people who watch these new movies may not even know they’re sequels! So, if you haven’t seen it and you like war movies with an action-driven bent, this will be a real find for you.