Rating: 4/10
I can only weep for Tim Roth.
Not because anything violent happens to him in Seven Snipers, but because a man who once anchored Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction agreed to spend ninety minutes crouched in Australian scrub answering to the name The Dragon, and nobody involved in the writing of this film thought to give him anything to do with it.
Roth isn't embarrassing here. He's just entirely beside the point, which might be the more damning verdict of the two.
The bigger mystery, though, is how this Sandra Sciberras production convinced anyone that this screenplay was worth financing in the first place. Action thrillers don't need depth to earn their keep. They need imagination, and Seven Snipers has none whatsoever, which is a strange thing to say about a film built around two characters called The Dragon and Voodoo Child.
Those names promise a mythology. The film never once tries to cash the cheque.
Two Extraordinary Names, One Empty Ledger
Voodoo Child is Kris Hendricks, played by Radha Mitchell, a retired sniper hiding out on a ranch with her daughter Anja (Annabel Wolfe), and the codename alone tells you there's a history here worth excavating.
A woman doesn't earn a name like that by accident. Somewhere in her past is a story about who she was before the archery lessons and the quiet farmhouse mornings, and the screenplay knows it, because it dangles the codename in front of you like a promise.
It never follows through. Kris and The Dragon share a history heavy enough to produce a daughter, a war, and evidently a small army of sworn enemies, and the film treats all of it as background noise to be gestured at rather than lived in.
You spend the runtime waiting for the flashback, the confession, the single scene that tells you what these two people actually were to each other. It doesn't arrive. Roth and Mitchell are left circling a mythology the writers built and then declined to visit.
The Trauma Nobody Bothered to Write
Anja is the more frustrating omission. She's the product of whatever happened between Kris and The Dragon, and for most of the film it isn't even clear whether she's curious about her own paternal lineage, which would have been a familiar trope but at least an active one. Instead the film settles for a vague, fractured mother-daughter dynamic you can connect the dots on without ever being invited to feel it.
There's a version of this film entirely willing to sit in that wound — a daughter raised on lies about her own origin, a mother who trained her in combat without ever explaining why, a reckoning between all three of them that earns its violence rather than just staging it. Seven Snipers gestures toward that film in its opening scenes and then abandons it entirely in favour of gunfire.
Death By Firing Squad
Where the film does commit is to killing people off, and it does so with a genuine ruthlessness that briefly perks the pulse.
Bianca Wallace's Kaldayev is dispatched before you've had time to register her, which stings a little, if I'm honest, mostly because it's the closest thing to an actual jolt this film manages. The trouble is that none of these deaths carry weight beyond the moment, because the screenplay never gave you a reason to invest in anyone before the bullets started finding them. Killing your cast quickly isn't tension. It's just turnover.
The Australian countryside, to its enormous credit, does not deserve to be in this film.
Kangaroos clear a ranch fence at one point with more grace than the plot manages in ninety minutes, and it's a genuine shame that scenery this good has been drafted into service for a screenplay this thin.
The Camera Has Other Priorities
There's also a noticeable, borderline distracting fixation on Annabel Wolfe throughout, a steady diet of close-ups and parted lips that reads less like characterisation and more like the camera being asked to do the film's seduction work for it.
It's obvious enough what's being attempted that it stops working almost immediately, and it becomes a mild irritant rather than the intended draw.
The maddening part of Seven Snipers is that the writers had genuine material sitting in front of them — a mother's secret history, a daughter owed an explanation, a villain whose name alone suggested someone worth fearing — and chose the sniping instead, which by every account here was improbable anyway. At least it moves quickly. That's the closest thing to a compliment this film earns.