I preferred the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
prequel
dir: Sandra Sciberras
2026
Well. This film’s title promises seven snipers, and it delivers seven snipers, six of which are there to die because one of them is so much better than all the others.
That this is an Australian movie, or at least a movie made in Australia that’s not pretending it’s somewhere else doesn’t improve anything one bit. Not one bit. And the fact that it has some famous people in it just makes you think how desperate for work many of them must be.
I mean, I can’t imagine they got paid that much, but it helps to keep busy, eh?
The devil does apparently make work for idle hands and for out of work actors. In this gloriously inessential movie Radha Mitchell plays some ex-military ex-mercenary who has been hiding out in some fairly isolated country area (being Ipswich, Queensland, from which nothing good has ever originated) who thinks the people after her for 16 years have finally tracked her down.
Coincidentally, she has a teenage daughter who’s about, oh, 16 years of age. Anja (Annabel Wolfe) is also surly and resentful about being kept on the farm. I wonder if she’s going to rebel in some way.
Anyway, a jerk posing as a real estate agent (Ryan Kwanten) rocks up to the property, and Radha’s character immediately clocks that something is wrong: mostly, a real estate agent turning up anywhere means something terrible is about to happen to more than just property values and the rights of tenants. This triggers a cascade of events in that, it means some really bad person now knows where Radha’s character is, and that this person, the Dragon (Tim Roth) is coming.
Tim Roth? How desperate for cigarette and beer money must he be to appear in this? The budget for this would have been about a packet of smokes and a six pack per actor, so admittedly that’s about $70 per actor.
He is one of the greatest snipers in world history, for some reason. Radha’s character, who I keep referring to as “Radha’s character” because calling her by her name, being Kris or Hendricks, or her call sign, being Voodoo Child, embarrasses me, is also meant to be one of the all-time greats, but she doesn’t think she can take him on her own. She calls someone who calls other people, and then we have Seven Snipers sipping Singapore Slings while awaiting certain death at the trigger finger of the Dragon.
Really, he functions like the shark in Jaws, like the killer in any slasher flick, even when he’s facing people who are meant to be adept with their sniper rifles at bringing death to those who wish them ill. But mostly they just sit around, patiently awaiting the bullet with their name on it, from the Dragon’s rifle.
The set up sounds like it’s going to be a sniper’s paradise, a tense battle betwixt pros, which, honestly, doesn’t sound at all that exciting. Snipers specialise at killing unaware targets from a distance. Mostly, our tension comes from “will they kill this person in time, or will something worse happen?” The best of these I guess would be Enemy at the Gates which might not have been historically accurate, but it certainly satisfied as a war movie (where the Soviets win?). It took a battle, a personal grudge between the Soviet peasant and the Nazi aristocrat and turned it into a tense bunch of hours.
It helps that Jude Law and Rachel Weisz were in their prime, too, maybe?
American Sniper was about a sniper, who was really good at killing people at a great distance, but it also wrestled at least with the PTSD that comes with having served in a warzone, have killed hundreds of people, and having had friends and comrades die around you violently.
This flick… well, if you’re a sicko who’s into that kind of thing, there are many scenes where people slowly crawl along wearing ghillie suits, occasionally adjusting their sights or their scopes. There are many scenes of people staring through rifle scopes, terrified of what they can’t see (being The Dragon) even more than what they can see (the clear absence of The Dragon, which means he’s somewhere else probably lining up his shot).
I hate calling him the Dragon: Tim Roth, after killing a bunch of shmucks, sidles up to Kris Voodoo Chile Hendricks and Tim Roth tells her outright “I’m going to kill everyone that’s left, then I’ll kill you, then I’ll take Anja away and make her forget you.” And she seems to agree with Tim Roth “yep, we’re all stuffed, time to run around hoping for something random to happen” and it kind of does. Tim Roth doesn’t yell once, doesn’t raise his voice, barely raises an eyebrow, and yet he manages to be more unsettling and implacable that a Terminator cyborg.
He is of course more world-weary, though. He is, must be, a brutal monster, but most of that is left to our imaginations. Virtually no-one has time for backstory here.
If there are positive aspects to Radha Mitchell’s work here, it’s that she’s convincing. She honestly is. She comes across as tough and practical as fuck. When high powered shots start depleting the people around her, she has no luxury of time to mourn for them. When she speaks to her daughter, it’s in a profoundly unsentimental way. She might as well call herself Sarah Connor because she’s all “do this right now so we don’t die”, or "remember your training and fuck your feelings until later when we can deal with all that.” When her surly daughter asks her how many people she’s killed, we get that something serious is going to shift in their relationship from now on, if they survive. You can’t look at (and back talk or sass) someone who’s just told you they have over a hundred confirmed kills.
I’m not saying that she’s now going to be more diligent about doing the dishes or the vacuuming, but she certainly might be if she knows what’s good for her.
Other flicks, and let’s be honest there are a stack of other action flicks identical to this, would have leaned into the “mommy will do everything to keep you alive because she loves you and you’re her precious little angel”, but this flick was more like “nup, we’re fucked, I’ll try to kill him best I can, I might have fucked up, we might all be dead soon, but if you’re any daughter of mine you’ll finish the job with the skills I’ve given you”.
And that’s something I appreciate, rather than the usual “person who’s closed themselves off from the world learns to live and love again by killing a bunch of shitheads who are after some child” which is like every second Jason Statham / Liam Neeson / grizzled old whoever / JLo movie.
Like, as previous implied, it feels weird that Tim Roth is in this, not that he plays the Big Bad. But what about Ioan Gruffud? Is he really so desperate for work? Isn’t he like… a Welsh superstar or something? He’s playing some grunt level sniper here with a high and tight haircut, with big biceps, admittedly, but this guy was the lead in lots of things. He played Reed Richards twice! He played Horatio Hornblower! He had his own ABC series, Harrow! Wait a second…
He, uh, has been in some stuff. Maybe I’m answering my own question. Everyone needs to eat, I guess, or keep working so that people don’t forget about them completely.
Take Note, Hollywood casting agents! He’s looking good and needs the work!
Roth doesn’t need the work. I think he chose to be in this out of spite. Other actors lift up the people around them with their performances, with their support. Tim Roth did this just to make everyone else (except Radha Mitchell) look bad.
Seven Snipers isn’t great, but it’s effective. Some of the editing is clumsy, and renders some parts of the action nonsensical, but it didn’t bug me that much. It also chugged along at enough of a pace that I didn’t even have enough time to wonder how incompetent all these so-called elite snipers would be sitting next to windows chatting to each other and not only never using but not even having any thermal imaging tech, like the rank fucking amateurs they truly are.
One of them with a thermal scope; the film is a short flick because it’s 15 minutes long.
But nah, drag the experience out, so we can best savour it, why not.
6 times Seven Snipers are okay, but Seventeen would have been better out of 10
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“First you survive, then you’ve got to live with yourself.” – therapy is more helpful than movies and television would imply - Seven Snipers
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