Sniper (1993), Sniper 2 (2002) and Sniper 3 (2004)

One of the major goals of a studio is to find financial success through the movies they release. An easy way to do that, once a hit movie is made, is to build a franchise around that movie. There might be diminishing returns as the series drags on, but people who saw and liked the first film will likely shell out money to see another. Hopefully more after that, too. The box office will be booming as the single movie turns into a franchise and, if the studio gets really lucky, a mainstay for general audiences.

Sometimes that doesn’t quite work out. A movie might be successful, but it lacks the built-in audience when it comes to sequels. Things fizzle out two or three movies into the franchise and the studio cuts its losses. That’s especially true of theatrical releases. There would be no point for a studio to make a movie if it wasn’t going to make back the budget. Or so things were until the growth of home video. At that point, franchises started popping up based on anything a studio felt like making more of.

Some comedies got the direct to video treatment, but it was truly the action and horror genres that flourished. A studio could make a movie for cheap, release it on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or video-on-demand, and make a quick buck. In between their tentpole theatrical releases, they could put out sequels to movies that people enjoyed in decades past. Any old intellectual property that wasn’t worthy of a big budget reboot or remake could get this treatment.

One surprising action movie that got the treatment was Sniper. Released in 1993, Sniper was about Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger), a sniper stationed in Panama. He was paired with Richard Miller (Billy Zane) on a mission to assassinate a rebel general and the Colombian drug lord funding the rebellion. They travelled through dense jungle to find their way to their targets while avoiding an enemy sniper who was out to stop them.

Sniper was about as run-of-the-mill as an action movie could get. It paired a seasoned veteran with someone who was essentially the fish-out-of-water type. That was the standard buddy cop pairing, only without the buddy cop rapport or any comedy. They were given a mission and they fulfilled it. There was some friction between the two main characters which climaxed in a violent encounter between the two, before they had to put their conflict aside for the greater good. Someone was injured. The final escape from enemy territory called back to the opening scene, where Beckett lost his sniping partner during a botched escape. Everything came full circle with some fun, simple action in between.

There was nothing about Sniper that truly set it apart as a movie that should get a sequel. The characters’ arcs had completely wrapped up. That might not be a huge deal because many franchises have characters’ emotional journeys being completed by the end of each movie. But that was still a thing in Sniper and still warranted a mention. It grossed a modest $19 million, which wasn’t enough to greenlight another Sniper film in 1993.

The main issue with moving the franchise forward, however, was the main character. There were two main characters who were thrown together for a mission. The seasoned veteran, Thomas Beckett, was an unlikeable character. He was good at his job, sure. That did not make him any more likeable. He was completely dismissive of Richard Miller. He went against any of Miller’s plans without telling Miller why until long after the changes were made. Thomas Beckett was given a couple of catchphrases that were each annoyingly blunt and violent. One of them was “one bullet, one kill.” He was basically saying to make the shot count, but in a way that it added to the body count. The other was “Put a bullet through his heart.” Really, that one had a bit of swearing in it, but the point was there. He was an abrasive ass, which didn’t make for the best character to follow.

Richard Miller wasn’t much better. He was a petulant man who projected that he had done more than he had. When a man was shooting at the helicopter he was in, killing other people who were on board, he pulled out his sniper rifle. However, he was too afraid to shoot. When the man was killed, everyone attributed it to his sniper work. He never clarified the situation, instead playing right into it. When he eventually did pull the trigger on someone, during the film’s biggest action sequence, he then snapped and tried to kill Beckett. He was mostly lost in an insane rage after having killed someone. Eventually, he turned things around to save Beckett, who had been captured by the psychotic henchman to the bad guys. The problem was that his personality was not one that people would want to watch time and time again.

Nine years after Sniper was released, the quality of low budget action had gotten better. It wasn’t great, but it was good enough that studios were willing to take chances on sequels to movies they made decades before. They chose Sniper and decided to bring only Tom Berenger back for what would be a television movie for Cinemax. It wasn’t a great idea to bring back an abrasive action hero like Thomas Beckett to anchor a franchise, but the sequel made the most of it.

When Sniper 2 began, Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) was a gun for hire. He wasn’t a mercenary. He was hired to train people how to hunt, and he hated it. The government and the military showed up with a mission for him and he jumped at the chance to get back into the fray. He was paired with a hotshot sniper, Cole (Bokeem Woodbine), who was doing a sort of community service after a court marshalling. They were tasked with assassinating a genocidal Serbian general, but things went awry during their escape.

The choice was made to bring Thomas Beckett back. It didn’t seem like a good choice because of how unlikable his character was in Sniper, but Sniper 2 brought some interesting traits to the character. The movie made it so that there was a reason he continued in the franchise. It was out of necessity, really. Continuing forward with a character whose only goal was to kill quickly and cleanly with no emotional investment would have made for a stale franchise that couldn’t grow. Something had to change.

Sniper 2 introduced the idea that Thomas Beckett was getting old and his skills were starting to fade, somewhat. He was still an expert sniper and could probably do any shooting job better than most. He also had a head on him that could help him evade any militarily dangerous situations. But there were a couple of setbacks to his skills that gave the character some emotional depth. The first was the result of a wound sustained in Sniper. Beckett had been tortured by the sadistic henchman of one of the targets. The torture involved a corkscrew being driven into his hand, rendering his trigger finger useless. Sniper 2 brought that back, with Beckett having to learn to use his rifle’s trigger with a different finger. The other thing added to affect his sniper skills was a case of double vision. Sometimes, while preparing to shoot, his vision would become blurry. He would need to refocus and regain his calm.

The other thing Sniper 2 did was pair Beckett with a more competent partner. Gone was Richard Miller and his angsty ways. In his place was Cole, who was a good sniper in his own right. His only issue was that he had been court-marshalled for murdering a DEA agent that he suspected had betrayed his team and gotten them killed. The new mission was his way of making amends to the higher ups. But it also gave him a death wish. He would risk his life for the mission in ways that someone trying to survive would not have. It made him good at the job after the assassination. It also made him somewhat more careless than Beckett.

The combination of Thomas Beckett and Cole worked much better than the combination of Beckett and Richard Miller. They felt like much more of a team, where Beckett and Cole felt like two men who were forced together and never really meshed with one another. The connection was solidified all the more when, in the climactic showdown between Thomas Beckett and an enemy sniper, Cole was fatally shot. Beckett got rid of the enemy sniper and took Cole to the escape helicopter, where he held Cole until he died. It was a moment of connection between the two, in a way that was never present in the first film.

Speaking of that sniper battle, one final thing that Sniper 2 did to continue the legacy of Sniper was a specific shot. It wasn’t a camera shot. It was a rifle shot that was kind of a signature action move for the Sniper franchise. Thomas Beckett was one of the best shots in the business. As the movies, at least the first three, showed, he could outwit and outlast any sniper he was against. He knew how to distract them and get them to shoot at nothing so he could locate and kill them. The killshot was the shot, though. He always managed to shoot through their scope and into their eye. It went against his “put a bullet through his heart” mantra, which might be why that was dropped for the sequel. But it was something he continually did. His shooting got even better in Sniper 3.

The third Sniper film, and the first direct-to-DVD entry, brought back Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) on a new mission. The NSA sent him to Vietnam to search out an old army friend who he thought had died in the war. Thomas Beckett was paired with Quan (Byron Mann), a Vietnamese police officer, to take down that former friend, who was now the biggest drug kingpin in Vietnam. Through their mission, the pair of unlikely partners unraveled a conspiracy from the Vietnam war that could have major effects on the current American government.

Sniper 3 continued one of the threads that had been built through the previous two entries in the franchise. Thomas Beckett was still coming to terms with the loss of his trigger finger. Following the torture he endured in Sniper, and learning to depend on a different finger as his trigger finger in Sniper 2, a new layer was added to the story. There was an uncontrollable twitch in his hand. The double vision had disappeared as an obstacle, and the muscle spasm was there, instead. It wasn’t much of a problem for a sniper as good as Beckett, but it was a little bit of a setback.

The other major setback was that Thomas Beckett had to go face-to-face with a man who had saved his life in the Vietnam war. The man was presumed dead. Thomas Beckett had read a letter from the man to the man’s family at the man’s son’s wedding. Thomas Beckett considered them his family because they were the closest thing to a family he had. Finding out that his old war buddy was alive and a drug kingpin in Vietnam threw Beckett’s whole worldview out the window. It was a lie that had become a fundamental part of his life, unravelling before his very eyes. And he was sent on a mission to kill the person in the middle of it.

These two things came to a head in the climax. It wasn’t that Thomas Beckett had to overcome his own muscle spasm to put a bullet through his old buddy’s heart. That wasn’t it at all. The scene was as follows. Beckett and Quan had infiltrated the lair of the bad guy. Quan had been in a fight to the death with one of the bad guy’s followers, while Beckett found a good spot to set up his sniper’s nest. After Quan won the fight, the bad guy used him as a human shield against Beckett’s sniper rifle. Beckett couldn’t shoot the bad guy or else he would kill Quan in the process. The bad guy had one of his men hold a gun to Quan’s head to try and get Beckett to surrender. Beckett didn’t surrender. He used his knowledge of the muscle in his hand to shoot the guy with the gun in that exact spot, moving the hand, through the force of the bullet, to point at the bad guy and causing the finger to twitch, pulling the trigger, killing the villain. It was the crack shot to end all crack shots.

Thomas Beckett saved Quan’s life because of his respect for the Vietnamese police officer. Their relationship wasn’t always that way, however. Beckett had been tasked to kill his old friend much earlier in the proceedings, during a sting led by Quan and another officer. Beckett missed the initial shot and ended up in a shootout with a sniper who, obviously, got killed by a shot through the scope. This time, that shot was done with a pistol, though, making it more impressive. Beckett thought that Quan had set him up. It was only through some later interactions that they became a half decent action team. They didn’t have the emotional connection of Beckett and Cole, though.

The first three Sniper movies showed what a studio could do to try and make a franchise work. They took what seemed like a one-off action flick from 1993 and turned it into a successful direct-to-video franchise. They fleshed out the main character enough to make him somewhat enjoyable to watch. They added some emotional depth and decent main character relationships. They also never shied away from the trademarks of the franchise. The mantra of “one shot, one kill” was always there, as was the shooting a sniper through the scope shot. It was growth with callbacks. It worked.

Sniper wasn’t nearly the only movie from that era to be resurrected in the direct-to-video world, but few were quite as successful in that market. There are only so many intellectual properties that people will want to see continued, years later, in a different film format. Many have been unsuccessful in capturing that same audience magic and stopped after one, maybe two, direct-to-video entries. Few franchises have continued to an eighth entry.

Much of the success that people find in franchise filmmaking is focused on box office returns. How much each installment can make in a wide theatrical release constitutes how many movies get made in a given series. Few people think about the direct-to-video market and the long-lasting franchises that have made a name for themselves there. Yet, there are many under-the-radar franchises that have kept chugging along in that market. They may not all be good, but they’re there. They have an audience. And, to some people, they’re just as fun as the big budget, theatrical fare.

Now for a few notes to close things out:

• Sniper was directed by Luis Llosa, who also directed Anaconda (week 80).
• Sniper 2 was the second Sunday “Bad” Movie directed by Craig R. Baxley, who directed Stone Cold (week 423).
• Linden Ashby was featured in Sniper 2. He was also in Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood (week 80), Mortal Kombat (week 140), and Beta Test (week 397).
• Tom Berenger was the only actor to be featured in Sniper, Sniper 2, and Sniper 3.
• Rex Linn had a small part in Sniper, which made him a Sunday “Bad” Movies three-timer. His other movies were Drop Zone (week 132) and Zombeavers (week 142).
• Billy Zane played Richard Miller in Sniper. He also showed up in Going Overboard (week 67) and The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (week 380).
• The final three-timer was Byron Mann, who was in Catwoman (week 174), Street Fighter (week 280), and Sniper 3.
• Hank Garrett was in Sniper and Baby Geniuses (week 50).
• Aden Young popped up in Sniper. He also popped up in I, Frankenstein (week 217).
• Sniper 2 featured Dennis Hayden from Wishmaster (week 410) and Bokeem Woodbine from Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (week 410).
• Dom Hetrakul returned from The Marine 2 (week 30) to be in Sniper 3.
• Finally, Denis Arndt was in Sniper 3 and Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid (week 80).
• Have you seen any of the first three Sniper movies? What did you think of them? What do you think of the franchise as a whole? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• I’m always open to suggestions about what I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. You can get a hold of me in the comments or on Twitter to tell me all about the movies I should be getting my eyes on.
• The Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram is always another fun place to find me.
• Reader, I gave you all the clues. You could have stopped this. Next week, I’ll be writing about 2017’s The Snowman. Come on back to see what I say about that one. See you then.