Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Woodyanders Weary veteran sniper Tomas Beckett (Tom Berenger in fine rugged form) comes out of retirement in order to take out a deadly rogue general in Serbia. Beckett is assisted by laid-back deathrow-bound convict Cole (a solid and likeable performance by Bokeem Woodbine), who will be granted his freedom if he succeeds in helping Beckett out.Director Craig R. Baxley keeps the absorbing story hurtling along at a brisk pace, builds a good deal of tension, and stages the thrilling action set pieces with skill and flair. Berenger and Woodbine play off each other well, with Berenger's tightlipped intensity nicely contrasting with Woodbine's ingratiating breeziness. Moreover, there are sound supporting contributions from the fetching Erika Marozsan as perky and helpful contact Sophia, Tomas Puskas as political radical Pavel, Dan Butler as the shady Eckles, and Linden Ashby as no-nonsense colonel McKenna. The compact script by Ron Mita and Jim McClain draws the main characters with depth and offers a few neat twists. Both David Connell's slick cinematography and Gary Chang's moody score are up to par. A fun little Grade-B action thriller.

Uriah43 After sustaining an injury that diminishes his value in the eyes of the United States Marine Corps, "MSgt Thomas Beckett" (Tom Berenger) is basically forced to retire and subsequently attempts to pursue employment elsewhere. Although he drifts from one job to another, he is surprised one day when a senior official from the CIA and a colonel from the Marine Corps approach him about taking an assignment in Bosnia to kill a prominent Serbian leader. Upon accepting the assignment he is given a spotter named "Cole" (Bokeem Woodbine) who has been released from a prison cell in Fort Leavenworth for the murder of an army officer. Although the assignment is extremely difficult, MSgt Beckett is satisfied with Cole enough to proceed with the mission but upon arriving in country finds that there are certain details that were deliberately omitted--and things take an immediate turn for the worse afterward. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that, even though the terrain was quite different than the first movie, there was still enough action and suspense to carry the film for the most part. That said, those who enjoy a movie of this type might want to give this one a look and with that in mind I have rated it accordingly. Average.

L P Yes, it's not a historical drama, but credibility about the milieu is a must even for action movies, otherwise they may easily get ridiculous, like this one.1. Hungary is (was) a neighbor to ex-Yugoslavia, but never part of it. So Hungary was also absolutely out of the ethnic conflicts and remained greatly neutral throughout. 2. We should imagine the whole movie happens in Serbia (the biggest of the successor-states of ex-Yugoslavia), however, everybody talks Hungarian, which doesn't even sound alike. (Serbian language belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European family of languages, while Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric group of Ural-Altaic family. Different grammar, different pronunciation, different intonation, different rhythm, not a word in common). It may not matter for the Americans, but Eastern Europe (even tens of millions in Western Europe) clearly understand the difference. 2/a. On top of this, the written Serbian is using Cyrillic letters, while Hungarian is using Latin letters (with certain vowels bearing special accents). Whatever is written in the street scenes of the movie - e.g. the "Szent Erzsébet" (Saint Elizabeth)statue in front of the cathedral - is written in Latin letters in Hungarian language.3. The Serbians are basically orthodox catholic by majority, while the Hungarians are basically Roman catholic. The cathedral bearing a central role in the movie has no connection to anything in a typical orthodox church in Serbia.4. All cars in the streets bear Hungarian license plates, showing the country code (H) and Hungary's national flag left of the 3-letter/3-digit combination of license plates.4/a. All military vehicles in the movie have Hungarian military license plates.5. To make a street scene, which the movie-makers believed as typical, they collected and showed all kinds of lousy Eastern-European cars (even including the infamous Polish van called Zuk), but no Western cars even by mistake. Such street picture was typical in Hungary up to the early 80s and in Yugoslavia up to mid-70s, whilst the story is happening in late-90s. 5/a Only one car does not appear in the whole movie: the Yugoslavian-made Zastava, the newer models of which were still in quite a quantity in the streets of Serbia in the late-90s.6. The Serbian police cars, which are hit and blown by the tram in the movie, are all of East-German-made Wartburgs (3-cylinder/2-stroke engine). Yugoslavian/Serbian police never had a Wartburg (unless a few sample/test cars, which I may not know). The typical Yugoslavian police car was locally built Zastava (originally Fiat-based cars), but in the late-90s (when the story is played) there were already hundreds of thousands of Western cars in Yugoslavia and even the police had many.7. The tram-cars are of Hungarian-built UV models, never exported to any country (not even to Yugoslavia) and they have Hungarian route-boards installed on their noses.You don't need to make a historical drama to be correct about elementary basics like geography, era and ethnography of your story and not to mix up everything into a terrible and greatly stereotyped mess. Being a European, it doesn't matter what is happening in the movie, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry as it is completely impossible to empathize the story under such visual and verbal circumstances. When we make a movie which story is playing in New York, we don't show agave fields instead of Central Square with people in sombreros, eating chili con carne and taco in the streets and drinking tequila in the bars, even though Mexico is the neighboring country to the USA. So the American makers may have believed the whole world is completely stupid and believes what they think a stereotyped Eastern Europe should be, however, for us living in this region, it is like a direct insult. So I believe it is a big mistake to play this movie in European TV channels (it is also a mistake to play it in the rest of the world because it is misleading people and don't give any realistic background about real Serbian milieu, but at least non-Europeans don't know all those mistakes).Finally, compare this cheap lousy nonsense with Evita, the street scenes of which were also filmed in the streets of Budapest instead of Buenos Aires, but you cannot catch it because all details properly fit.Big shame on the producers of Sniper-2 !!!

bob the moo Since his medical discharge, ex-Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett has drifted around but has continued to impress in national competitions . So much so in fact, that the military come to him with an offer – anything he wants in return for an "off the books" mission deep inside the Balkans to assassinate a Serbian general believed to be committed atrocities against the Muslim population. Beckett picks military deathrow prisoner Cole as his spotter but is his sense of mistrust well placed in regards this mission?Sniper was solid and Sniper 3 was OK if unremarkable so I went into part 2 in the series being pretty sure that it was going to be more of the same, which more or less it was. The plot is basic though and nowhere near as interesting as it thinks it is. Asides to McKenna explain the plot to the audience while the main characters alternate between occasional action scenes and lots of talking. The plot vaguely plays with the rights and wrongs of being a soldier and the atrocities of the Balkans but mostly it is very thin wallpaper that is of no lasting (or even temporary) value. The action (and build-up) isn't really that interesting and is far from exciting – it isn't the lack of effects or budget, but just a lack of intensity or passion in the delivery.The cast match this rather lacklustre approach by doing the tick-box basics. Berenger mumbles and grunts his way across the film – his words suggest an interesting sort of character but in reality his performance offers little. Woodbine matches this by speaking as gruff as he can but that's about it. Outside of them nobody really makes an impression apart from the odd support member who you may recognise from other television shows or movies.Overall a fairly obvious TV movie that has potential but prefers to mostly just churn the story and characters out with the minimum of effort.