One Shot

I started to watch this lame excuse for a film on GREAT movies action on UK Freeview as I just needed an evening vegging out after a hard day at work. However, I was unable to relax as this film - called Sniper Elite in the UK - is woeful and irritatingly so. I enjoy trashy alien movies such as Cowboys vs Aliens. At least in that film they made and effort to make the alien soldiers look extra-terrestrial. The costume manager for this film probably got a job lot of SWAT uniforms at an army surplus store. The rest of the budget was probably spent on half a dozen tubes of Colgate blue gel toothpaste for the aliens' blue blood; a few cans of industrial black paint for the plywood set masquerading as the interior of a space station; some bedsheets out of which to make Arabic looking costumes for the non-military aliens. I doubt anything was spent on the cast as they had very little to do, except run around or look sincere/intense. To save the money spent on the army surplus gear and toothpaste the producers appear to have done away with the need for a screenwriter and director and let the actors ad lib lines. Of course, the aliens speak English/American. You know what? This film doesn't even deserve to have viewers wasting their time writing a review let alone watching this drivel. I actually gave up after 50 minutes. It's right down there with Jaws, The Revenge as one of the worst films I've ever seen.

My wife and I had finished watching something pretty good on N..F x (yes, that can happen), and she then called it a night while I decided to check out some stupid B (C or D) list action movie. I've sometimes been pleasantly surprised. Although usually not. This movie falls into the not category. Or make that NOT.

I gave it a rating of two only because I only give ones when I'm offended. This wasn't offensive. It was just all the other bad and irritating things a truly bad movie can be: boring, pointless, derivative, fake, cheap, slapdash, cheesy, cliché-ed and ... in the end ... barely having any claim to be either a war movie, or a sci-fi movie. I'm usually offended by attempts to become philosophically deep ... scenes thrown in to drive home some drively political "message". But this movie, while it almost tried, made such a lame attempt at it that it was basically inconsequential to the rest. Almost tried, is a good definition of this entire production. It doesn't even try.

This movie doesn't need a spoiler alert, because the ending is so obvious that even the premise and the description of the first 20 minutes gives away the ending.

Take away the so-called sci-fi touches, this is just an American sniper in -- someone suggested Afghanistan -- but definitely some middle eastern country, battling ISIS or the Taliban. His unit has been wiped out, and now he's alone and the only way to escape is to ... stay where he is and scan the desert region endlessly, and watch the camp of the bad guys, endlessly. If you removed the scenes of him looking through his scope and not seeing much of anything, you'd cut this movie down to an hour. Sometimes, just for whatever (to get a bit of food or water maybe) he goes down and attacks the camp, miraculously killing anyone he comes across. Nothing's believable. He's immortal. He can be in a firefight with 20 bad guys shooting at him with automatic rifles, and he takes them out with karate kicks, a pistol, or a knife. He actually gets captured at one point, that that of course was no problem. A slight diversion, and he's rescued.

Just for the sci-fi dimension, he's supposedly on some planet. For some reason, he's supposed to be a good guy, although you're left wondering how the good guys can be that, when they are the ones who have invaded this planet and the people who are there are "insurgents". There's no attempt to deal with this ambiguity. It's all just boo-rah ... including recuperating your dead.

The sci-fi thing is provided by some 2001 Space Odyseey command ship which, like a spy satellite, can watch the sniper's every move. But they don't do anything up there but comment on how great he is, or how he's in terrible danger all the time, and make plans to save him but never can for reasons that no one bothers to really explain. The actors playing the command ship scenes, which consists of some black painted plywood set, have nothing to say but ... well, there he is, getting into a cave, or there he is, running around, or whatever ... and the commander seems to know everything that is happening, including the sniper's motivations and plans. It's remarkable.

And remarkably lazy ... or just stupid ... writing. Some people call this sort of thing uninspired. But that's a term you'd use for someone who is perhaps capable of being inspired? This is obviously the level of writing you get from someone who is only capable of the most cliché-ed ideas. Nothing is original. And the director really can't do anything with it but throw in some lame fight scenes, long survey-the-desert sequences, and drop a few "alien"/human socio-cultural "exchanges. And there's a really bad guy, actually two ... a bad/bad alien guy who looks like he's straight out of Kabul, and the good/then bad human guy, to I guess show that this whole human adventure on this planet is bad? Or? ... And there's a very sexy alien princess this sniper is suddenly protecting, thrown in, to make sure there's SOME reason for the sniper to seem like a hero.

I get irritated when I see this sort of thing. OK, I get it. This provided work for some people. But ... wow ... what gets me is that these types of Netflix filler fodder aren't put through some sort of quality process. The writer of this thing should never be given any more money, ever, for full length movies. There are probably several hundred other aspiring writers who could have provided something more interesting. Or at least not so laughably cliché-ed.

It is so obvious the 'bad Aliens' are supposed to represent Muslims.. the ethnicity of the actors who play the parts of the aliens are of middle-eastern descent or closely resemble Arabs and middle-eastern. The way the female alien and the leader of the aliens are dressed clearly resembles that of tribes men and women. In my opinion whoever made this movie had an agenda... and it was anti-Muslim. Before anyone gets the idea I am Muslim and I am being over sensitive.. think again, I am an atheist and as far as I am concerned all religions are ridiculous. But what is even more ridiculous is someone making such a cringeworthy and obvious piece of anti-Muslim propaganda. To make things worse, it is a dreadful story line, really bad dialogue, poor production quality and badly acted. Watch it and decide for yourself.

I am a big fan of scifi movies. Even when they are cheaply made. As long as they have a intelligent made or even just interesting story i am entertained by that. On Shot did not entertain me at all.

There is a sniper who is somehow observed from a military space station using an infrared telescope. Thats the whole scifi part of this movie. This guy does what a sniper does. Lying in the dirt, sniping and running to his next position. After watching for 15 minutes a sniper running through the desert, shooting "aliens" which are just guys with contact lenses and fancy gas masks i started to fast forward. >> More desert >> more sniping >> more guys with contact lenses and gas masks and so on. All non military "Aliens" look very arabic by the way. Maybe because people which live in deserts automatically dress like arabs ... even if they are aliens.

If you cut out the few parts with the space station you could easily retitle the movie to "Afghanistan sniper adventure". Some people would maybe wonder why the Afghans have all blue eyes and what unusual brand of gas mask they are wearing there, but most people would not even notice that it was meant to be a science fiction flick.

This is probably a somehow acceptable sniper movie, but it completely failed at being a science fiction movie.

Just because a film has a low budget, doesn't mean it needs to be stupid.

There's too many moments where our hero stands out in the open, surrounded by enemies and yet they all miss. They are worse than Stormtroopers!! Supposedly well trained military do the most ridiculous things.

The other rather annoying thing is that despite the film being called Sniper Elite on Amazon Prime, there's very little actual sniping.

The story drags and goes nowhere. There's a really out of place monologue towards the end that is laughable. Most of the run time is spent trudging across a flat desert / scrub land.

There's maybe a vaguely interesting premise behind this film, but it is lost under the weight of bad story telling, awful script, cliche, and poor direction.