Mercedes was hot and the weapons were cool so it gets higher than a 1.
It starts out well, you have a sniper out for revenge for 'a botched mission' but God help us if that is all it takes to turn one of our heroes against us. Anyway, I was looking forward to getting more of the back story but it never came. I loved the auto firing canon (hard to call it a rifle) the rogue used for his first hit. He was up close and personal when he used it. That got me really interested in his motive which was never explained :-(. It went downhill from there.
War films glam up the action and that's okay to a point but once it goes too far, I can't get past it. The next scene pushed it too far.
You have 5 snipers waiting to ambush one bad guy and you see them taking so much care to get everything perfect. You see range, wind, temperature and ... all taken into account. When the sniper misses, the bad guy's body guard swarm attacks the hill with automatic weapons both on foot and in trucks. The snipers are now clustered on a hill, their position exposed, with cumbersome bolt action rifles and under suppressing machine gun fire. But despite all this, they are now able to hit the bad guys with every single shot they take, at any range with almost no time to aim. I was waiting for the behind the back shot. A bad guy pops up out of nowhere, and bang, he's dead before he can flinch. But later on in the movie, the snipers exchange over 100 rounds with the rogue at close range and everyone misses every shot.
They also had the catfight trope, where the one woman on team bad guy, ends up doing single combat with the one woman on team sniper. In all fairness, that is in the rule book of action movies (guess who wins because the other one takes time to gloat?)
Had they delivered on showing an actual moral conflict or developed the rogue sniper's motive, I would have rated this higher. The good guy sniper was going through his own unexplained moral crisis throughout this movie but Mercedes fixes that in one sentence at the very end. 'killing evil terrorists in Syria is a good thing', problem solved. Since this is a non-issue that ends up having no impact on the flow of events, why bring it up at all?
It starts out well, you have a sniper out for revenge for 'a botched mission' but God help us if that is all it takes to turn one of our heroes against us. Anyway, I was looking forward to getting more of the back story but it never came. I loved the auto firing canon (hard to call it a rifle) the rogue used for his first hit. He was up close and personal when he used it. That got me really interested in his motive which was never explained :-(. It went downhill from there.
War films glam up the action and that's okay to a point but once it goes too far, I can't get past it. The next scene pushed it too far.
You have 5 snipers waiting to ambush one bad guy and you see them taking so much care to get everything perfect. You see range, wind, temperature and ... all taken into account. When the sniper misses, the bad guy's body guard swarm attacks the hill with automatic weapons both on foot and in trucks. The snipers are now clustered on a hill, their position exposed, with cumbersome bolt action rifles and under suppressing machine gun fire. But despite all this, they are now able to hit the bad guys with every single shot they take, at any range with almost no time to aim. I was waiting for the behind the back shot. A bad guy pops up out of nowhere, and bang, he's dead before he can flinch. But later on in the movie, the snipers exchange over 100 rounds with the rogue at close range and everyone misses every shot.
They also had the catfight trope, where the one woman on team bad guy, ends up doing single combat with the one woman on team sniper. In all fairness, that is in the rule book of action movies (guess who wins because the other one takes time to gloat?)
Had they delivered on showing an actual moral conflict or developed the rogue sniper's motive, I would have rated this higher. The good guy sniper was going through his own unexplained moral crisis throughout this movie but Mercedes fixes that in one sentence at the very end. 'killing evil terrorists in Syria is a good thing', problem solved. Since this is a non-issue that ends up having no impact on the flow of events, why bring it up at all?