The opening scene of “Seven Snipers” has a familiar feel, but also a little juice. Radha Mitchell’s Chris is coaching her daughter Anja (Annabel Wolfe) in archery. There’s some talk of calculating wind speed, a little snarky mom-daughter banter, and then a fairly satisfying bulls-eye. Then off Anja goes to grab some quality time with her boyfriend, and Chris is approached by a friendly guy in a big pickup truck who wants to buy up her large expanse of Australian farmland.
Chris is not only uninterested, but she’s also not buying the pitch in any of its aspects. She demands to know who the man really is—she seems to have some idea why he’s really here—and then a long-range shooting match erupts, with both parties taking cover equipped with sniper rifles, scopes, and more. The standoff ends with Chris triumphant but not placated. She knows the schmuck she has dispensed with was an advance man for a figure entirely more formidable.
And so, in this action thriller directed by Sandra Sciberras from a script by Andrew O’Keefe, Chris summons the title seven snipers, one-time colleagues for the most part, with a few younger fellows filling in for fallen comrades. (Indeed, the call Chris initially puts out is for nine snipers, but their ranks have thinned irrevocably.) The age difference allows for some predictable and eye-roll-inducing humor. One of the older snipers, White Dog (Damien Ryan), tells his younger charges all about the woman they’re coming to help—Chris Hendrix, who is “no relation to Jimi”—and none of his whelps gets the joke. What a world. (Chris’s code name is “Voodoo Child,” after a Hendrix song, albeit a Hendrix song whose correct spelling is “Voodoo Chile,” but with respect to material such as this, that’s neither here nor there.)
The personage that the snipers have assembled to face Chris is called The Dragon, and he’s played by Tim Roth. Roth is a formidable actor with the kind of up-and-down filmography you associate with genius giggers who just like to work. Here, he’s not quite phoning it in, but as in his 1994 film “Little Odessa,” in which he plays a much less grandiose assassin, Roth has done much more committed work. (He does look pretty good here in his camouflage, which rather resembles the “kukeri” outfit worn by several characters in the great 2016 film “Toni Erdmann.”)
But the movie is really about the women. Mitchell runs and crouches and grunts and sweats as she tries to duck The Dragon, tend to her mates who are falling with an ever-increasing frequency, and not just keep her daughter safe but explain to her how they ended up on a remote ranch down under. “Have you killed a lot of people?” Anja asks. Chris is reticent to reply, but ultimately says, “Hundred and sixty.” Might as well just rip off that Band-Aid, I get it.
Chris’s rationale lands comfortably in the land of cliché: “First, you survive. Then you gotta live with yourself.” Once Anja learns the not-particularly-shocking secret of what ties her to The Dragon (one guesses this early on, especially given his long-distance treatment of Anja’s boyfriend), she herself starts yelling and screaming and crouching and running and sweating.
Other than that, this is the kind of movie in which a character will say, “I will trust these people with my life,” and then, bang, one of those people, the one standing just nearby in fact, gets it in the back of the head and crumples into a lifeless meat bag. Lotta sound and fury (not just the gunfire, but Mike Forst’s “I Heart Hans Zimmer” score), but not much signifying.
