Tom Berenger

Sniper (1993)

Sniper (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) There are times when Sniper feels like a throwback to the Reaganesque military adventures of the 1980s, merrily overthrowing Central American regimes for the heck of it. But as the film advances, it clearly attempts a deeper kind of story with two mismatched snipers, one of them inexperienced and nervous about actually killing anyone. Alas, Sniper doesn’t quite commit to this psychological exploration—before long, we’re watching a solid action film with inventive one-bullet kills (one of them through the scope of a rival sniper, of course) with a structure suspiciously feeling like a horror movie except with meticulously planned shots leading to the gory kills. Our two mismatched buddies do eventually learn to trust each other and become even better killing machines, so at least the film has that bit of machismo going for it. Despite my sarcasm, it’s an adequate film: Tom Berenger and Billy Zane do well in their developing relationship, with director Luis Llosa providing the expected thrills. Sniper is perhaps best known today for having spawned no less than six sequels, all of them straight to video and some of them even reprising the lead actors from the first film. This being said, this first instalment does feel stuck between two poles, being neither completely satisfying as a “fun” war adventure, nor as a psychological exploration of what it takes to be a sniper. The same material has, since then, been covered in far better movies such as Shooter, American Sniper or Enemy at the Gates. This leaves Sniper a bit redundant, although still reasonably entertaining on evenings where there’s nothing else on.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, February 2019) One of the niceties of being a French-Canadian cinephile is having access to channels that work on very different standards than the Anglosphere. Such as the one filling its Thursday late-night movie slot with racy material from cinema’s crazier years, often dipping into little-known oddities that have probably been forgotten by nearly everyone else. (I suspect that there’s a filter effect to the necessity of showing dubbed movies—some decent films have never been dubbed while bad ones have been, and you can guess from which catalogue the programming director makes their selection.)  Which brings us to Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a dark and depressing exploration of the perils that await a young woman as she sinks in ever more extreme levels of hedonism, regularly bringing back strange men to her apartment. The biggest surprise here is the casting, with Diane Keaton (looking a bit like a young Juliana Moore or Nicole Kidman) playing the lead role in an utterly off-persona performance as a schoolteacher by day, drug-sniffing party girl by night. Other familiar (but young!) faces include Richard Gere, Levar Burton and Tom Berenger as the big villain of the movie. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is not a fun film to watch, as it comes straight from the gritty New Hollywood era and keeps heaping more and more abuse on its heroine until an utterly bleak ending that takes everything from her. Richard Brooks’s direction can be intense at times, with numerous pulls into the character’s inner life and fantasies without warning, and a strobing red-and-black colour scheme that brings on the extreme violence of the ending. It’s quite an unpleasant film, with disco music being the least of it. Chicago nights are scary in this film, and the script (adapted from a novel) adds some heavy-duty family drama to make things seem even less pleasant. There’s plenty of nudity and viewers will pay the price for it: in the 1970s, nobody was allowed to have fun at the movies on either side of the screen. I’m glad that I got a chance to catch Looking for Mr. Goodbar, but I’ll be even gladder to let it fall in obscurity.

Platoon (1986)

Platoon (1986)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, November 2016) There have been many great movies about Vietnam, but for all of the respect I (and others) have for Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter or Full Metal Jacket, I think that Platoon is better than all of them in giving us a cohesive soldier’s view of the conflict, without necessarily building up to a larger metaphorical point. (Apocalypse Now happens in parallel with Vietnam, The Deer Hunter is about the scars it left and Full Metal Jacket is a collection of great sequences with a threadbare link between them.) Oliver Stone writes and directs from his own experiences, and the result has an authenticity that’s hard to shake off. From the first few moments when our protagonist (Charlie Sheen, baby-faced, sympathetic and humble) steps on the ground and sees the haunted veterans, it’s obvious that this is going to be a wart-and-all portrayal of the conflict. By the time our protagonist hooks up with the local drug users, we’re clearly far from pro-war propaganda pieces. Platoon is also canny in how it sets up a conflict between two senior soldiers (one, played by a suitably intense Willem Dafoe, trying to be civilized about an uncivilized situation, and the other, played with even more intensity by Tom Berenger, surrendering to the madness) that compel our protagonist to choose a camp. Terrifying combat sequences all build up to a natural conclusion to our viewpoint character’s war experience. Lauded upon release, Platoon is no less effective thirty years later—largely because it sticks close to its own authenticity and doesn’t try to make more than what’s already a significant point about the combat experience.