SNIPER MOVIES LIST

Plot

The movie starts off with Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett (Berenger), an experienced sniper, and his spotter Cpl. Papich (Aden Young) assassinating a Panamanian rebel leader in the jungle. Afterward, they take up a position in an isolated part of the jungle and wait out until nighttime for an extraction. However, they are extracted at daylight much to the dismay of Beckett. An experienced rebel sniper, formerly trained by Beckett, kills Papich as the two reach the helicopter, but Beckett is able to retrieve his body and bring it to the helicopter. Infuriated, Beckett blames the helicopter CO for Papich's death.

Reception

Critical response to the film was mixed. Rotten Tomatoes reports a 48% approval rating based on 142 reviews; and an 82% based on 120,688 audience reviews. Metacritic assigns the film a weighted average score of 53 out of 100, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Empire had a verdict of 'The sequel-ready Swagger challenges Bourne's supremacy with an impressive shoot-'em-up, work-it-out action drama.'

Some film critics, both liberal and conservative, saw the film as left-leaning in its politics, arguing that the main villain (Senator Meachum) was a clear analogy for Dick Cheney.

Reception

Although the film was written and production photography completed in late 1967, it was released after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in early 1968 and thus had some topical relevance to then-current events. Nevertheless it was not very successful at the box office.

However, Bogdanovich, who appears in the film as a young writer-director (i.e. like Karloff, playing a character very similar to himself in real life), credits it with getting him noticed by the studios, which in turn led to his directing three very successful studio films in the early 1970s.

The movie is currently included as one of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

Response

The movie has been criticized for a lot of technical flaws, for example: The Serbs in the movie were speaking Hungarian rather than Serbian (as the actors playing the Serbs were all Hungarian).

Sniper 3 is a 2004 action adventure direct-to-video film starring Tom Berenger, Byron Mann, John Doman and Denis Arndt. It was directed by P.J. Pesce and written by Michael Frost Beckner and Crash Leyland.

The movie is the third in a trilogy starring Berenger

Billy Zane as Richard Miller. Zane returns to the role he played in the first film (sniper 1993).

Straight Shooter is a 1999 German movie about an ex-member of the French Foreign Legion who makes the German government responsible for the death of his family and goes on a killing spree to stop the service of an nuclear plant.

The police are helpless and so the ex-instructor (Dennis Hopper) of the killer is brought to Germany to hunt the killer down.

Plot

The movie chronicles the period when John Allen Muhammad (played by Bobby Hosea) and Lee Boyd Malvo (played by Trent Cameron) went on a serial shooting spree in October 2002 in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, all parts of the Washington Metropolitan Area, the entire area of which was held in a grip of terror.

The protagonist is Charles Moose (played by Charles S. Dutton), the chief of the Montgomery County Police Department in Montgomery County, Maryland, who is one of those heading the efforts to track down the snipers.

Unable to give anything but small pieces of information at various press conferences held during the 23 dark days, Moose finds himself vilified and derided in many corners as ineffectual and incompetent. Indeed, quite a few newspapers outside the area targeted by snipers came right out and called for Moose's resignation. But the chief's dogged persistence ultimately paid off and — in the sort of twist that a professional writer of thrillers might dismiss as inconceivable — the two men arrested for the carnage turned out to be the archetypal "least likely suspects."

Elephant White is a 2011 action-thriller film starring Djimon Hounsou and Kevin Bacon. Filming took place in Bangkok, Thailand.

Reception

The film was poorly received in the former Soviet Union. Some Red Army Stalingrad veterans were so offended by inaccuracies in the film and how the Red Army was portrayed that on May 7, 2001, shortly after the film premiered in Russia, they expressed their displeasure in the Duma, demanding a ban of the film.

The film was received poorly in Germany. Critics claimed that it simplified history and glorified war. At the Berlinale film festival, it was partially booed. Annaud stated afterwards that he would not present another film at Berlinale, calling it a "slaughterhouse" and claiming that his movie received much better reception elsewhere.

In the United States, the film received mixed reviews; the most common complaint among even the positive reviews was over the inclusion of what was seen as an unnecessary love-story that detracted from the main plot. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that it "is about two men placed in a situation where they have to try to use their intelligence and skills to kill each other. When Annaud focuses on that, the movie works with rare concentration. The additional plot stuff and the romance are kind of a shame". New York Magazine's Peter Ranier was less kind, declaring "It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script."

The German-Russian writer Wladimir Kaminer played an extra as a Soviet soldier in the film. In his book Russian Disco (2000), Kaminer criticizes how the Soviet soldiers are portrayed as hooligans getting drunk and playing farting games.
[edit] Notes

Reception

This film generally garnered a very poor rating although receiving an average rating of 3.9/10 stars on IMDb. The general consensus of the reviews offered is that the film is let down by the poor re-use of scenes barely seconds apart and the terrible acting grade by the actors. There is also a general tendency to call this film comical as its entire premise is played out to be stereotypically ridiculous and over the top action and situation wise.

The film was a direct-to-DVD movie. In the first week The Marksman opened at #11 at rentals chart and earned $1.36 million

Critical reception

The American received a generally positive response from critics, garnering a 66% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 203 reviews with an average score of 6.5/10. Its consensus states "As beautifully shot as it is emotionally restrained, The American is an unusually divisive spy thriller—and one that rests on an unusually subdued performance from George Clooney." Similarly, another review aggregator, Metacritic calculated an average score of 62 based on 35 reviews. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers gave the film two and a half stars, writing director Anton Corbijn "holds his film to a steady, often glacial pace," and is of "startling austerity."

Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, writing, "Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in Le Samouraï, by Jean-Pierre Melville." Leonard Maltin called it a "slowly-paced, European-style mood piece, short on dialogue and action and long on atmosphere."

Box office

According to Box Office Mojo, the movie grossed $14,638,755 on its opening weekend (2,218 theaters, averaging $6,599 per theater). The movie grossed a total of $35,662,731 in the North American market and $18,878,474 outside the U.S, making a total worldwide gross of $54,541,205.
Critical reception

The movie received mostly unfavorable reviews, scoring a 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, with that site's consensus being that it is "A violent mess of a movie, Smokin' Aces has some Quentin Tarantino's style but not much of his wit or humor".
DVD sales

Smokin' Aces was released on DVD on April 17, 2007 and sold 1,853,397 DVD units which produced a revenue of $35,714,831, or more than double the movie's budget.

Prequel

On July 17, 2007, director Joe Carnahan announced that production had been approved by Universal Pictures for a second Smokin' Aces film, which he would not direct. The film is a prequel to the original and was released straight to DVD on January 19, 2010

Critical reception

Roger Ebert gave the film a negative review, writing, "I knew going in what the movie was about (few films have such blunt premises) and I knew Two-Minute Warning was supposed to be a thriller, not a social statement. But I thought perhaps the movie would at least include a little pop sociology to soften its blood-letting. Not a chance. It's a cheerfully unashamed exploitation of two of our great national preoccupations, pro football and guns."