No Surrender Cinema: Sniper: Ghost Shooter

As part of the Actionversary here at Bulletproof Action, I decided to circle back and revisit an entry in one of my favorite film series. If you’re a regular reader of No Surrender Cinema, you’ll know that I’ve been a fan of the Sniper series dating back to the original film. With several of the films, including the latest release (last year’s Sniper: G.R.I.T.) getting noticed by a wider audience thanks to Netflix adding them to their action section, it feels like the perfect time to talk about one of the earlier entries that feature friend of the site Chad Michael Collins, 2016’s Sniper: Ghost Shooter!

Brandon Beckett (Collins), Richard Miller (Billy Zane, reprising his role from the original film), and their team are on a mission to rescue hostages from a foreign menace, but things go sour when Beckett hesitates to pull the trigger after he sees that the target is a kid. Had he killed him, he might denounce firearms like what happened in China O’Brien, but since this is the Sniper series and not a fists and kicks karate flick, Beckett’s delayed reaction allows all hell to break loose. Before you know it, bullets are flying from both the sniper unit and the terrorist cell they were targeting, one hostage gets beheaded, and The Colonel sends in the heavy artillery to back his boys up. Everybody survives, but the feeling is that Beckett was the problem here, putting him at odds with his peers.

Despite the epic failure of a mission that opened the film, Beckett and co. are soon tasked with guarding a pipeline from insurgents by a newly arrived female superior officer, one whom Beckett was about to put the moves on prior to her reveal as the person who would be tasking the team with guard duty. As the crew arrives in Georgia (the country, not the state), there’s a rather ominous shot of a flock of sheep moving across the landscape, which I took to be a metaphor for the carnage that’s about to come. Sure enough, Mission #2 in Sniper: Ghost Shooter goes south, as Beckett’s crew gets its ranks thinned by the appearance of a rival sniper and his allies. The Colonel (Dennis Haysbert) sends in drones for a missile assault that eliminates the remaining threat, but with no body to show for it, the good guys feel that Gazakov (the sniper) is still alive. None of this sits well with Beckett, who thinks that his friends are dead because of an inside job, and his pushback earns him a trip to the Grand Caucasus Mountains to join up with a Russian unit led by Mashkov. In between bringing Beckett on missions and showing him his country’s way of doing things, Mashkov loves to quote Die Hard and informs Beckett of his past, one that involves Beckett’s father, which provides a nice link to previous Sniper films even though Tom Berenger is absent from this one.

After Russian soldiers put Beckett and Mashkov under siege (thanks to another turncoat; this one is revealed as the guide who initially led Beckett to Mashkov’s unit), Beckett finds himself acting as a one man army coming to the rescue of his new Russian friend. With the threat eliminated, Beckett is picked up by his unit and put back on the ground with them, resuming his quest to find out who it was that went over to the dark side. This makes the whole ordeal with Beckett being suspended from his unit feel like a side mission, since aside from some sage advice that Beckett gets from his new comrade Mashkov, it really doesn’t play much into the final firefight in Sniper: Ghost Shooter.

Speaking of the final portion of the film, once Beckett is back in action with his squad, the goal is simple; get Gazakov. The team finds themselves under assault again where the casualty count increases, all but guaranteeing that the enemy forces are going to have hell to pay. It all boils down to a showdown between snipers, with Brandon Beckett finally prepared to eliminate the threat of Gazakov once and for all and prove that he’s more than capable of filling his father’s shoes. The blood and bullets are plentiful, and given that this is a film that came smack dab in the middle of the Sniper franchise I don’t think it’s a secret to say that Brandon Beckett survives as the hero of our story. 

The Sniper franchise has evolved over the past 30 years, continuing to do so as it forges ahead to what I hope will be an 11th installment in the near future. Anyone who saw Berenger and Zane on that first mission back in 1993 may not recognize the world of Sniper now, as that tension-filled thriller has gone the way of high-octane action, feeling at times like you’re watching a Call of Duty simulation (it probably doesn’t hurt that Chad Michael Collins is a COD veteran as well, both playing a part in the game and being an avid gamer himself). In fact, last year’s Sniper: G.R.I.T. feels a bit different from this film despite them both being on the more modern end of the Sniper spectrum, thanks to the latter invoking a bit more of the buddy-cop wisecracking style of dialogue. This all sits well with me, because the evolution of the series has helped it endure the test of time by helping each individual chapter stand out in its own way. Sniper: Ghost Shooter‘s only offense to me is that things seem to breeze by, so you don’t really get a chance to sit with the twists and turns of the plot before it’s onto the next action sequence. Far be it for me to complain about too much action (and we get it in spades here), but I would have extended the run time by just a bit more to give both Beckett and Gazakov’s stories room to grow.

If you’re scoping out something filled with military mayhem, familiar faces, and a solid (if condensed) story, then you should head on over to Netflix before August 31, because that’s the last day they’ll have Sniper: Ghost Shooter available for viewing. The film is also available on physical media, and given the popularity of the Sniper films (even the older films perform excellently on Netflix to this day), I would guess it’s only a matter of time before it’s readily available again. I love how this series has morphed into a hybrid of COD and G.I. Joe and I am here for it, so here’s to hoping it won’t be too long before we’re back here talking about the latest Sniper adventure.