Bam! Boom! Kapow! That might be a tempting summary of Sniper 3. It would be equally tempting to reduce it to a single sentence: Thomas J. Beckett (Tom Berenger) wreaking his particular brand of chaos back in the jungles of Nam 30 years after that war has ended. Although this film may not offer much more than the above summaries suggest, my problem, apart from a general dislike of the kind of reductionism that believes films can be reduced to words, is that I found more in it. And exactly how this is possible is something that I would like to untangle before I get to the end of this review.

Sniper 3 is in the category of those action films that deal with post-traumatic syndrome and the difficulty of social readjustment experienced by Vietnam vets who, having served their country and fought a war that stopped meaning something to them long before they returned home, discover that the America they left behind no longer exists and that they are confronted with a world they no longer recognize. Thomas J. Beckett is a crack-shot marine sniper, a relic from Vietnam suffering the beginnings of a degenerate nervous disorder who runs into constant conflicts with superiors who question his unorthodox methods. He is recruited to return to Nam to carry out a secret government mission: assassinate a one-time friend who is now a gun-runner with links to international terrorist organizations. In Nam, Beckett finds himself caught in a double-cross in which the people who hired him attempt a cover-up by trying to eliminate him once his mission is complete. If from a narrative viewpoint Sniper 3 sounds fairly clichéd, it is. It presents a series of events that convey scriptwriters J.S. Cardone and Ross Helford’s (not particularly original) views on the way that the American government dumped and abandoned hordes of Vietnam vets in order to pursue its own political agenda. Even the title is readily associated with a trend in which films tend to decline in quality with each new sequel. From a character viewpoint, it scrubs up much the same. Beckett’s a man who is only really at home when he is at war. He’s a direct descendant of characters such as John Rambo and Travis Bickle, characters for whom the ‘New America’ was as much a battlefield as the war they left behind, and for whom violence had become a way of life they could not escape. Whether such characters are emotionally disturbed, like Bickle, or merely leading emotionally empty lives and unable to enter into relationships with others, like Beckett, they share a mentality forged in the heat of the jungles of Nam where the only law of life was ‘kill or be killed’.

Sniper 3 is a direct-to-video production. Such productions tend to bristle with the hackneyed and the clichéd and are made for audiences whom producers assume haven’t tired of a format that others consider to be synonymous with poor quality. Although such an assessment is often easily justified, these films can be far more complex and nuanced in the expressive possibilities of their representations than might at first be expected. The genre conventions that these films lean so heavily on establish a ‘family resemblance’, (to borrow a term used by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations), in which one film continuously tends to evoke a pattern of overlapping resemblances and common features that it shares with other films of the same ‘family’. For example, one such resemblance can be seen in the conventional representation of the central hero/anti-hero as an emotionally-damaged alcohol-dependent world-weary outsider who is a failure in everything that normal life offers but reveals an uncanny skill and precision in everything to do with the art of killing. In this respect Sniper 3’s Beckett conjures up Man on Fire’s Creasy, Apocalypse Now’s Captain Willard and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle to name a few. And it is precisely the presence of a certain generic blandness to the features that define Beckett’s character that allow him to function like a mirror across which the resembling features of these other characters can play. This play of reflections creates a whole series of complex and nuanced meanings that cut across genres and viewing expectations. Thus, the awareness of the resemblance of Beckett to Man on Fire’s Creasy also makes the viewer aware that unlike Creasy whose whole trajectory builds towards a moment of personal redemption, a moment of meaning that finally emerges from the meaninglessness of his life, Beckett’s violence emerges from the exhausted limbo that we meet him in at the beginning of the film and returns to the exhausted limbo that we see him in at its end. That is, both the resemblance and the contrast between Beckett and Creasy alert us to the fact that there is no redemption for Beckett, that his heroic activity is accompanied by a total absence of personal fulfillment, that it quite simply, is slowly but surely wearing him down. The unexpected nature of such a response lies in the fact that it acts as a counterweight to the more generic moral certainty that occupies centre stage in Sniper 3’s main narrative development. The film-makers intention seems to have been overwhelmingly to give us a man of action with a strong sense of moral right and wrong, and an equally strong sense of his mission -- he gets the job done and doesn’t count the cost. But the resemblance and contrast with Creasy sets up an undertow of futility that subverts the film’s status as a simple action movie informed by a fairly shallow emotional dimension. Here I’ve followed through only one thread of ‘unauthorized’ meaning, but the activation of many such meanings can lead to a substantially enriched viewing experience, an experience that, interestingly enough, was never intended by the filmmakers. On the physical level, the filmmakers of Sniper 3 aim to deliver what every action movie aims to deliver: destructive fast-moving kinetic energy. And on the conceptual level, (if there is one), they aim to say something no more complex than given America’s current war on terrorism there’ll soon be a whole new generation of war veterans suffering social and psychological problems. Which means that in Sniper 4 we should see a Beckett-like hero being sent back for one last mission to the deserts of Iraq. Let’s hope there are plenty of unauthorized meanings.

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