Fighting for a fresh future
Viewers are rarely as handy with weaponry as one of Keanu Reeves’ most-famous characters, Bob Odenkirk in the John Wick-inspired Nobody movies or Mitchell as Seven Snipers’ protective protagonist. Nonetheless, everyone understands the idea that each figure is fighting for. No one wants to be defined by who they once was, or by the trauma they’ve endured. Everyone covets the chance to relegate their history to remaining just that. Making the campaign for a fresh future tangible, physical, bloody and brutal hammers those truths home blow by blow and shot by shot.
This isn’t a subtle category of films, nor is it trying to be. Indeed, this subgenre, and Seven Snipers within it, thrives on narrative and emotional simplicity, and on clear-cut cause-and-effect journeys.
Here, Kris was once an expert military sniper, codenamed Voodoo Child, until she left the field to have and raise Anja. She’s also in hiding after escaping from warlord The Dragon (Tim Roth, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man) on her final job. It has taken him over a decade and a half to track her down, but Kris has been preparing for this inevitability. When the suspicious Phillips (Ryan Kwanten, Primitive War) starts poking around her remote home, she knows what’s coming.
A stripped-down story
In establishing the movie’s premise, plus the toll that Kris concealing her real line of work has taken on her relationship with Anja, Seven Snipers is economical (in length, too, with its 87-minute running time). There’s a difference between pared back and slight, with O’Keefe’s screenplay thankfully in the first camp – stripping the story down to its essentials while still making the details count.
The day in question happens to be Anja’s 16th birthday, for instance, which she’d rather spend with her doting boyfriend Michael (Lee Tiger Halley, Beast of War) than at school or with her mum. That tension is as much of a factor in the Hendricks’ parent-child relationship as love is immediately apparent. Through Kris’ response to Phillips’ sudden arrival, it’s equally clear that she’ll do anything to defend her daughter. Also evident is the fact that Anja’s patent rebellious streak, a reaction to her mother’s caution her whole life, will ramp up both the stakes and the danger.
Nothing about Seven Snipers’ plot is difficult to predict from there, but what the film lacks in surprises, it makes up for by concisely delivering exactly what it promises.
A showcase for Radha Mitchell
There’s no doubting that Mitchell could’ve anchored a movie solely focused on a one-on-one duel with Roth through gunsights and scopes, and grippingly. They make engaging adversaries, the intensity of their performances selling Kris and The Dragon’s acrimony better than flashbacks to their shared backstory.
The film is named Seven Snipers for a reason, though, so Kris calls in backup from her old colleague White Dog (Damien Ryan, Big Sky) and the best team that he’s able to assemble at short notice. Decked out in camouflage fatigues and ghillie suits, the crew includes Harrow’s Ioan Gruffudd, Loveland’s Bianca Wallace, The Demon Disorder’s Charles Cottier and The Bluff’s Pacharo Mzembe. Among the supporting ensemble, only Gruffudd gets the chance to play more than a one-note figure, albeit barely. Portraying Milk, another co-worker from Kris’ active days, he brings empathy to a character who offers a reminder that a life spent being paid to kill needn’t turn your heart cold.
O’Keefe’s script doesn’t fall into the trap of making everyone around its lead, her daughter and their enemy instantly disposable, although, in the feature that results, there’s never any question that this is Mitchell’s show and showcase.
As Kris, Mitchell melds the action-oriented and maternal angles she’s brought to past roles – including Pitch Black, Phone Booth, Man on Fire, Rogue, Olympus Has Fallen, London Has Fallen, Looking for Grace, Swinging Safari, Celeste and Blueback – not that the two are always mutually exclusive.
Knowing and hitting the mark
Leafy sights and rural Aussie settings aren’t mutually exclusive either. With Mystery Road already giving Australian cinema an impressive outback film featuring long-range shootouts – co-starring Kwanten as well – Seven Snipers smartly opts for grass and greenery over sunburnt soil. The terrain’s verdant foliage provides visual texture when bullets start flying in tautly staged action scenes, alongside abundant hiding places to parallel Kris and Anja’s 16 years in seclusion. Sciberras and cinematographer Andrew Conder (Rock Island Mysteries) do also have a minor battle on their hands to ensure that every sniper-on-the-sod shot doesn’t make it seem like each character is in the same spot.
If Seven Snipers had overstayed its welcome and overcomplicated its tried-and-tested premise – or been absent such a resolute effort from Mitchell at its centre – it might’ve played like the entire movie was stuck where plenty of other similar pictures have gone before.
There’s a small trend emerging across recent Aussie films, however, with The Deb, Beast and now Seven Snipers all accepting how their chosen genres and storylines typically pan out, then striving to do their best with their version.
