Dreaming about a YouTube ambient video titled, “Meditating with Dolph Lundgren in his high rise building sniper’s nest while raining.”
While Silent Trigger (1996) is an action movie that gives fans what they want – Dolph using a massive sniper rifle to take down masked mercenaries who are toting sub-machine guns – it also aims for an arty ambience, as if director Russell Mulcahy (of Highlander and Ricochet) rewatched Le Samoruai and wanted to get some existentialism into his pulp. Mulcahy also knows how to add a bit of sizzle to a factory-produced steak; this is the type of movie that has a shot of a building upside down, and then a boot steps into the image of the building, revealing we’re looking at the building’s reflection from a puddle in the street.
The movie is like a Metal Gear Solid cut scene with Waiting for Godot pretensions. Lundgren is a sniper who sneaks into a corporate tower under construction. He takes up position at a window on the top floor, and is eventually met by his spotter, a breathy British babe played by Gina Bellman (from the UK sitcom Coupling). As the film’s opening, and flashbacks strewn throughout the narrative, make clear: they worked together before in a vague Eastern European conflict, and there’s a level of distrust. Lundgren failed to clear his target and Bellman as a rookie showed more trust to her masters than her shooter. The only other inhabitants in the building are two security guards, one of whom is revealed to be a drug-taking psycho who takes orders from the spiders tattooed across his body. A lot of the movie is Lundgren waiting for the moment to take out his target, and the chemistry and intrigue he has with his spotter.
My favourite scene has the duo in an intimate conversation next to the green-lit windows as rain falls, ambient noise competing with the score that has a sexy exotic Deep Forrest sound. As soon as you hear that music, a love scene seems inevitable but we get there through Lundgren’s reflections on being in war and seeing the enemy in himself, and when they eventually have sex, the film cuts to flashbacks of them escaping from the war. To me, the film’s obliqueness doesn’t necessarily have any depth, but I appreciate its reaching for something, if only to be enigmatic and strange. That and its “tech shit” atmosphere of anonymous black bag organisations and click-clacking sniper rounds, and impersonal corporate interiors. Available on Amazon Prime. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 