Official Trailer
Rating: 5.7/10 | Genre: Action, Thriller | Runtime: 87 min
Starring: Radha Mitchell, Tim Roth, Annabel Wolfe, Ioan Gruffudd, Ryan Kwanten
Seven Snipers is a lean action thriller that tries hard but doesn’t quite land. It’s got the pieces for a solid revenge story, but something gets lost between the script and the screen.
Radha Mitchell plays a former sniper who’s spent years hiding out on an Australian farm with her daughter. When the warlord from her past tracks her down, she has to dust off her skills to protect the kid. It’s a simple setup. Maybe too simple. The movie knows what it is and doesn’t waste time with backstory or character development. You get about eighty-seven minutes of action and not much else.
Mitchell does fine with what she’s given. She’s got the tough-as-nails thing down, and there’s a scene early on where she’s calculating wind speed and distance that actually feels tense. But the script doesn’t give her much to work with beyond “protective mom who can shoot.” Tim Roth shows up as the villain and seems like he’s in a different, more interesting movie. He’s got this quiet menace that the film doesn’t deserve. He could chew scenery, but instead he’s just sort of there.
The action sequences are the main draw here, and they’re decent. There’s a firefight on the farm that has some good moments. Real guns, real impact. But the pacing is weird. The movie will have a burst of action and then just kind of sit around waiting for the next scene. Dead air. I found myself checking the time.
What really bothered me was how the daughter character gets handled. She’s supposed to be the reason for everything, the heart of the whole thing, but the movie forgets about her for long stretches. When she shows up again, I’d basically forgotten she existed. That’s a problem when protecting your kid is supposed to be your motivation.
The Australian setting is kind of wasted too. You shoot a revenge thriller in the outback, you should lean into that isolation and brutality. Instead it feels like they could’ve filmed this anywhere. The farm looks like a farm. There’s nothing distinctive about it.
Look, this isn’t a bad movie. It’s just a forgettable one. It does the job for eighty-seven minutes and then it’s over. The 5.7 rating on TMDB seems about right. It’s got enough action to keep you from being bored, but not enough character or style to make it stick with you. If you’ve got nothing else to watch on a Sunday afternoon, it’ll pass the time. Just don’t expect to remember much about it by next week.
Have you seen this one yet, or are you on the fence about it?
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video