This movie is a joke and a waste of time (possible spoilers)
I am watching this movie now after having spent two weeks trying to find it - I have been wanting to see it hoping it would be an accurate depiction of a sniper's world, their methods, etc. What a disappointment from a movie titled Sniper.
What I was hoping would be a useful insight into the way snipers work and get things done is a 90 minute cringe-fest in which Tom Berenger's part is entirely made up of tired old cliches and formulaic imagery: the dog tags he keeps playing with to illustrate the number of partners he's lost, the indifference and condescendence with which he treats his new Washington-appointed "partner", the supposed nightmares he is having about the people he kills, how he entertains dreams about going back to a home that's not there anymore, and so on.
I think this is just another case of a great idea for a movie but extremely badly executed: bad writing, bad acting, truly horrible editing (especially the dream/flashback sequences), inaccurate depiction of what I have come to think of when I think of a sniper i.e. a calculated, meticulous and patient killing machine capable of spending days under the same bush waiting for the perfect shot. Not to mention the childish rifle scope graphics which I would have thought the technology was there in 1993 to make them look a bit more professional and believable.
I find scenes like the one where Beckett urges Miller to "feel the rush" and to "nail that mother***er now" simply ridiculous and difficult to watch. I don't care how stupid you assume your audiences are, that can't be the way a seasoned army professional such as a sniper talks. Or the scene in the beginning of the movie where a helicopter flies in to extract Beckett and Papich and Beckett goes: "Aw, those dipsh*ts, I told them no daylight", like he is surprised to see them and as if something as important as the extraction out of a mission like that would not be decided well in advance and stuck to.
Here's a few non-rhetorical questions I have:
1. How come they take a train to the jungle and do not get flown in? (I know Beckett explains it at some point, but it just seems a bit odd).
2. Why don't they have their faces painted throughout the mission but only in the beginning?
3. Don't they seem to be walking through the jungle and into the populated areas a bit too casually, in a very conspicuous, non-sniper kind of way?
4. Why don't they infiltrate the hacienda at night? The whole scene where they prance around that farm in their ghillie suits in broad daylight (especially Miller) is almost funny to watch. Not to mention Miller sticking his rifle out of the barn once he has taken his position.
5. Why does the helicopter picking Beckett and Miller in the final scene have signal lights flashing? On a mission like that I would imagine they would want to be as difficult to spot as possible.
I am sorry if I sound too rabid about this, but I guess in my quest to find a decent sniper movie I felt really let down by a movie that does not do its title justice.
What IS the best sniper movie out there? Could it be Shooter?