Warning: Major spoilers for Sniper: The Last Stand below!Despite being the eleventh entry in a cult action series, Sniper: The Last Stand features an audacious twist that genuinely caught me off guard. It may lack the brand recognition of other long-running franchises like John Wick or Mission: Impossible, but that just makes it all the more delightful that the Sniper series has reached eleven entries and counting. For the uninitiated, the series follows the adventures of veteran sniper Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) and later his son Brandon (Chad Michael Collins) as they hop around the world on various dangerous ᴀssignments.

The quality of the Sniper movie franchise has been (pun slightly intended) hit and miss, but the most recent sequel The Last Stand is the best entry in a long time. The Danishka Esterhazy-directed outing plays with the series formula in creative ways while ditching the misfiring humor of the previous two films. What really impressed me was Esterhazy’s decision to pull the rug from underneath viewers around the midway mark, when it revealed the purpose of villain Kovalov’s (Arnold Vosloo) superweapon.

I Can’t Believe Sniper: The Last Stand Wiped Out The Villain And Half The Cast Midway Through

Half of The Last Stand’s ensemble literally drops ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

During the opening scene Beckett is part of a raid on Kovalov’s compound, and as a desperate last measure, Vosloo’s villain activates an experiment pulse weapon. It emits a small blast, but none of the characters caught in its radius appear affected. That’s until the midway mark when Sniper: The Last Stand upended my expectations for where the story was going by killing half the team and Vosloo’s antagonist inside of a minute.

I haven’t felt so wrongfooted by an action film in a long time, with the abruptness of this scene being genuinely shocking. Not only does the sequel kill off one of its biggest supporting players in Vosloo (The Mummy movies), but it completely redirects where the story is heading. It turns out Kovalov’s doomsday device has the power to kill via a pulse wave, and the rest of the story involves the team prepping for an incoming militia ᴀssault while making sure the weapon is destroyed.

Action Franchises Need To Learn From Pulling Off Such A Bold Twist 11 Movies In

Sniper used it’s formula against viewers

Wiping out half the cast isn’t just about shock value – it underlines very clearly the threat posed by this weapon. There’s a comfortable familiarity to a series like Sniper, and while a new director will come in and add their own style, it always falls back on the key beats. What I found thrilling about The Last Stand’s big twist is that it used that formula against me this time. I was expecting a meat-and-potatoes action flick that got the job done, but it proved that even after watching eleven Sniper films, a franchise could still strive to uproot expectations.

Bigger budget franchises could learn that lesson too. The Fast & Furious movies have become complacent in recent years and felt that so long as they added more actors and setpieces, audiences would come back. It was this strict adherence to the rulebook that made Fast X such a tired, bloated slog, and the subsequent mixed reviews and disappointing box office it received reflected that.

I’m not saying Fast 11 needs to wipe out half the characters like The Last Stand did, but it would be nice to see more sequels zigging instead of zagging and seeing what happens. It helps that Sniper: The Last Stand also delivers on the action front, with the final act essentially being a non-stop setpiece filled with shootouts and fights. It ticks all the boxes fans come for while making sure to toy with expectations.

The Sniper Series Is Now A Rare Breed Of Action Franchise That I’d Love To See More Of

Action movies don’t always have to be so formulaic

In addition to leaving me feeling energized about the Sniper series, the film gave me some (admittedly faint) hope other franchises could follow a similar path. It’s not like an action movie’s story needs to be particularly complex or subversive, but with audiences so familiar with how certain types of movies play out, it’s time to try a different path. While not a franchise, Netflix’s Rebel Ridge is another example of a genre offering that looked familiar on the surface and delivered the action but also worked to make the characters engaging and keep the plot unpredictable.

If Sniper 12 happens, I’d love to see it take more big swings like The Last Stand’s midway shocker. Likewise, it would be cool to see the likes of the James Bond or Jason Bourne series playing with their formulas and keeping audiences on their toes. Wishful thinking probably, but if the eleventh entry in a B-movie action saga can aspire to bigger things, there’s no reason other properties can’t.