Ever since I watched 10 sniper movies I can’t stop thinking about sniper. I guess this makes sense because I watched that many of them right but I don’t know, they were all kind of shit to a consistent degree. But there is something that still bothers me, I guess it’s kind of funny to want to hold like a reactionary movie franchise for dads to standards, but like it really fucking bothers me that sniper ended up as the dumping ground for chad michael collins to do operator shit when infinity ward isn’t knocking on his door for modern warfare. the first movie would nearly be profound if Luis Llosa could direct his way out of a fucking wet paper bag, a brief look at what happens when the pigs hollow out a man with a melon baller and let him rot in a jungle with a decade with nothing else but a rifle and an endless list of targets, a psychosexual nightmare where the effete NSA dandy played by Billy Zane stumbles around the jungle like a little boy while the sniper attempts to pull him into the world of gay fascism that has consumed him. billy zane is virginal, he has never killed another man before, never watched himself enter someone else, and the whole movie is like tom berenger seductively whispering to him about how he needs to “do it…FEEL THE RUSH” and send his fucking cock through another mans heart already. but it’s just a job, he doesn’t think about it, right, just like billy zane doesn’t think about it when he spends all night crawling through the mud to rescue a man who has spent the entire movie trying to poison him, poison his soul irreversibly… lies they tell to make themselves feel better. and he finally succumbs to the power of killing…it should be tragic, it is tragic! though this series feels totally disinterested in what is actually like the core emotional arc of it to me, the story of the sniper man who can’t stop killing, the protagonist who’s life is perpetual violence that he can’t stop dragging people into. Billy Zane comes back in Sniper: Reloaded to counsel Beckett’s son and it’s kind of a great piece of character work on his part, because we see what’s happened in the past decade: the poison worked. hes butched up, he is just as hollow now, and he gets to have the same arc with beckett’s son that he had with his father all those years ago, which would might actually be interesting if the movie bothered to draw these parallels at all - instead of something emotionally relevant like his first kill at the end of the first movie it instead takes time to revel in shit like him blowing the upper half of a guy’s torso apart with a sniper rifle like Rambo 4. In its own way I think you could make it work, because now that the demon has him it demands blood too, but then that’s not in service of the movie’s actual plot about rescuing belgian guys from their plantation in the congo at the behest of the UN or how white big game hunters in Africa are cool.
A franchise at odds with itself. In a way it’s almost appropriate that this franchise has degenerated into misogynist snuff porn where the characters performatively weep over gunned down camgirls, where the one woman is just poor Yuki getting punched in the stomach over and over in John Wick fights, where the violence is now like supposed to be whimsical and justified and everyone is quipping like a Marvel movie after blowing some guy’s head apart with a .338 Lapua. You are now fully subsumed into the state, extrajudicial murder is a fact of life, a necessary evil, they have you body and soul now. Beckett’s conflict in the earlier films was a sign of weakness. He was a weak man who wanted to put the rifle down, not like his son, who delves into his CIA contract killer work with gusto.
When I watched Sniper 3 I wondered why beckett keeps doing every single shitty thing the ostensible fed villains of every movie want him to, and like it’s obviously the subtext of this broken man doing literally anything he can to get back to the world of killing, they kick him out of army after the first movie cuz he gets his trigger finger cut off…in sniper 2 it takes basically zero convincing to get him to go to serbia because he knows it’s probably a suicide mission and at least he can die on the battlefield, it’s like some Mishima shit with Beckett, he just wants to get domed by another sniper good enough to kill him. And Bokeem Woodbine’s death row inmate hot shit delta boy takes the mission because he wants to die outside of cage, his last words before succumbing to his wounds “Freedom!”, these are the final words of the movie actually… because it’s something beckett can never have. No point in dwelling any further. There’s something interesting in one of the sequels, probably Sniper: Legacy (which has the tagline “Like Father. Like Son. Born To Kill.” btw) where he like lays out this elaborate fantasy about running a fishing hole in north carolina or something, and eventually I think his son has to tell him that it hasn’t existed for over ten years, and you can see on his face that part of him just withered away…he clung to that for a long time. There is no way out other than a shallow grave in the twilight world of soldiers.
“He picked me because he knew he could mold me,” Malvo said at Red Onion. “He knew I could be what he needed me to be. . . . He could not have chosen a better child.” Muhammad would lurk over Malvo’s shoulder and tell him to envision himself shooting and killing the old Lee Malvo, the weak Lee Malvo, the wayward Lee Malvo.
So Malvo shot at himself, over and over and over again. When it came time for the first killing — Kenya Cook, 21, in Tacoma in February 2002 — Malvo said it was almost automatic. Muhammad told him what to do and he did it, he said. He saw his own face on Cook’s and was thinking he shot himself. He said he doesn’t even remember what she looked like. He vomited later, racked with grief.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Malvo said. “I knew I was going to die one way or the other, that going down this path ended with my death.”
