Sniper: The White Raven is a Mixed Bag

Sniper: The White Raven is first a human drama that doesn't work, and second, a war film that works more often than it doesn't. Our main protagonist, a Ukrainian man identified simply as Raven, is a math teacher. However, Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine back, and so when a group of stereotypically Russian soldiers cross the border and, by a turn of bad luck, burn Raven's home down and murder his wife, Raven signs up for the army with the stated goal of becoming a sniper. Who wouldn't? What follows is a war movie like any other you've seen that does some things well and other things not so well. It's about as subtle and unpartisan as an activist, but when it comes to the subject of war itself, White Raven mostly shoots straight.

As patriotic films tend to be, this one can be heavy-handed, treating the mundane with an ethereal sincerity it may not always deserve. White Raven is trying extremely hard to be taken seriously when it doesn't need to, and I chalk this up to it being a geopolitical statement first and a story second. It's a movie made as much for Ukraine as it is by Ukraine, and it doesn't always work out of its insistence on telling us things rather than showing them to us and letting us make up our own minds. In short, White Raven is about the almost gnome-like and always peace-loving Ukrainians being forced into a brutal war by the violence-prone and almost comically evil Russians. This movie is an extremely one-sided affair, and while I understand that it doesn't aspire to be anything more than an ooh-rah moment for Ukraine, it comes off as unintentionally shallow because of it. Don't get me wrong, its intentions are pure, but noble pursuits do not necessarily equate to good filmmaking.

Luckily, this movie shoots straighter when it comes to the war in war film, picking up steam in its middle third. The first firefight in this movie between Raven, his team of snipers, and the Russians is modest by Hollywood standards. Still, with each encounter, White Raven becomes deadlier and more unpredictable as a good war movie should. In essence, this story is about Raven's metamorphosis from a pacifist into a killer, and the occasional time-crunching montages of him doing so are frenetically well-edited. Like some poor veterans coming home from the front, this movie may not know what to do with itself in peacetime, but it has few problems making war on its enemies, diving headlong into the nitty-gritty of being a sniper. We are made to understand not just what Ukrainian snipers do, but how they do it, and more importantly, how they don't. Or should I say can't? This movie does a good job of making itself seem dangerous. Every last detail could be the difference between life and death for the men and women behind the scope. Raven's past as a math teacher is put to satisfyingly practical use, and serves his aspirations to be a sniper well. For all of this movie's flaws, nothing Raven does ever seems particularly wasted.

White Raven looks and acts like a series of Call of Duty missions, but there are moments when it becomes more. One of my favorite such moments features Raven and a group of Ukrainian snipers creeping through a foggy meadow at dawn. There are no Russians afoot at the moment, no mortar shells screaming down on them, and no armored personnel carrier rumbling through the valley ahead. It's a strange quiet in the eye of the storm for a movie about what has become one of the largest and most widespread conflicts since World War II. White Raven works at the top of its game when it's trying to be quiet instead of loud. Still, a slow first third, a largely excellent middle third, and a mundane final act don't bode well with me.

White Raven can be disjointed, like three different television seasons with three different levels of quality shoved unceremoniously into a single, two-hour package. And outside of a couple of exceptions, the battles between Raven and the Russians - the big selling point of this movie - are too often numbingly mediocre. One can only watch so many heads get pulverized in Gerard-Butler-esque ways before it gets mundane, so it's unfortunate that the combat sequences in White Raven ended up being as pedestrian as they were. I understand this movie is a patriotic exploitation flick, but is there an unspoken rule forbidding great patriotic exploitation flicks? One can only imagine that the filmmakers were doing the math and taking into account that no one in Russia would be stumbling over each other to watch this movie. Maybe they took a look at their wallets and chickened out? I understand patriotic films have limitations. Sometimes, those limitations are more evident than otherwise.

One part the All Ghillied Up mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, one part Jackson's prayers from Saving Private Ryan, and one part geopolitical exploitation, Sniper: The White Raven is a good-enough Ukrainian war movie that arrived just in time to look specifically like it was taking advantage of Russia's real-world invasion of Ukraine. Of course, work on this movie began in 2019, but the wannabe pundits won't care. White Raven is a subpar human drama mixed with a solid war movie, and it works at some points and not at others, depending on what it's trying to be. It's evocative of classic revenge films while at the same time trying to be a heartfelt tragedy, and it's better at the former, seemingly unwilling to explore the latter below the skin. Still, its setting and occasionally immersive scenery do enough to differentiate it from traceable war dramas that otherwise have a lot in common with White Raven. It's patriotic to a fault, weepy to no end, yet remarkably innocuous unless you're Russian. It tries to demand something of you, yet I was left unmoved by its half-hearted attempts to be deep. Remarkably enough, the mundanities of being a sniper are the strongest aspects of White Raven. It's a movie that often tries too hard, so ironically, the everyday life of Raven and his team of killers is what feels the most natural. And at its best, that is just how this movie feels: natural.

Sniper: The White Raven - 5/10

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