Note: The writer of this review has looked The sniper on a digital screener from home. Before you decide to see it – or any other movie – in a movie theater, consider the health risks. Here is an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
Liam Neeson, the growling Irish saint of ex-cops and deadly fathers, isn’t an obvious choice for the role of an ornery, conservative Southwestern farmer. Yet he is there as Jim Hanson in Robert Lorenz’s The sniper, wearing a cowboy hat and a rifle with a telescope in hand as he broadcasts Border Patrol over some “IAs” near his property. As we’ll soon learn, the land Jim is defending won’t be his for much longer. While standing in front of the farm at dusk, an American flag draped over his shoulder, he receives a message that a dick is banned from the couch. Coyotes and vultures, both literally and figuratively, have made an appearance. The symbolism of Mr. Economic fear is a heavy burden to bear.
Days later, Jim spies on a woman and her son sneaking through the border fence, chased by heavyweights. The second amendment comes out and the steel shine. Neeson’s interpretation of an American accent seldom sounded less convincing: “Sorry, Pancho, these illegal immigrants are mine.” The standoff turns into a shootout, the woman ends dead, and after some extensive soul searching, Jim finds he is on the run with the boy, Miguel (Jacob Perez), partly out of guilt over his role in mother. and partly because a backpack full of stolen cartel money is involved. At this point things start to fall into place. The kid, the grin, the politics, the indifferent pace, the unobtrusive heart, the complaints: this would be Clint Eastwood’s property.
G / O Media can receive a commission
It is possible that The sniper was conceived for the former Man With No Name. Lorenz, who was previously in charge of 2012 Problems with the curve, has been Eastwood’s producer ever since mystical river, was his assistant director before that and has logged in from Clint in the United States for a total of more than a quarter century. Perhaps the equipment was too close to Eastwood’s recent and upcoming road trips (The mule and the current message Cry Macho), or maybe it just called for a younger tall, cross-eyed, aging star. Lorenz is clearly not shy about the inevitable comparisons. He even gives Eastwood some sort of cameo through a clip of Hang them high that is played on a TV in a motel room. (It’s the scene with the eggs.)
This makes a critic’s job a little too easy. If one were to diagnose a central problem with The sniper, it’s that it’s not actually a Clint Eastwood movie; it lacks the breathing room, the casualness of the first time that is always an appealing contrast to Eastwoodian purposefulness. Despite some concessions to the Neeson screen persona (Jim is a widower and a disillusioned habit of the local watering hole), the plot remains uninhabited. Jim tries to deliver Miguel to the boy’s family in Chicago while being pursued by a cartel killer (Juan Pablo Raba) and by his own stepdaughter (Katheryn Winnick), who is a border patrol agent. Hearts are softened; man and boy band; the mile markers of a quasi-salvation arc are crossed using a current road map.
The result is somewhere between tribute and anonymity, drizzled with some stiff, perfunctory battle scenes. Despite all this, Neeson remains the image of a stubborn, vigilant dedication. Even he seems to know he’s the wrong guy for the job, giving his dusty archetype the kind of dutiful obligation that The sniper otherwise impossible to express. One can imagine the stern, self-flagging, self-hating, post-Takencycle Neeson waiting to erupt so that he can weigh up his character’s drinking, his regret, his apparent loss of faith. But instead, he’s behind the wheel of a pickup truck with a dog by his side, grumbling about cell phones and the government.