Shot Through The Heart

SHOT THROUGH THE HEART (1998)

This is my goal for the new millennium; to come up with a new definition for porn. When you pick up a movie or book and put up with it merely for the few scenes that you want to see, that's porn. Jurassic Park, for example, is clearly dinosaur porn. I just finished two books of shark porn; Meg and The Trench. So please don't misunderstand when I review this movie, not in regards to its considerable merits, but mainly by how effective I think it is as sniper porn.

It's not easy to find cinematic sniper porn; most of the best sniper scenes are sort of tucked away in movies ostensibly about other subjects. Saving Private Ryan, for example, has two great scenes of sniper porn, with Barry Pepper praying in a cornpone accent and dropping enemy soldier like flies. The sniping scene in The Killer is pretty decent, and I've always liked the moment in Desperado where the director uses Antonio Banderas' sniper-scope enlarged eyeball to underscore his recognition of his presumed-dead brother.

Sniper Porn: As exciting as it gets... But, although I have just started to delve into the subject, the number of sniper related movies are not large, nor really very impressive. Which brings me back to this movie. Based on John Falk's article The Anti-Sniper, Shot Through the Heart is the reenactment of the tragic true story of two friends, both expert marksmen, who become snipers on opposite sides of the war in Sarajevo. Because people have to be brought up to speed about how the conflict in Sarajevo came about, as well as the nature of sniping and then, in addition, counter-sniping, to say nothing of the human element, Shot Through The Heart has a lot to deal with in a relatively short amount of time and does so with a remarkable economy and grace. The odd couple friendship of family man Vlado Sarzinsky (Linus Roache) and charming bachelor Slavko Simic (Vincent Perez) really works on you and you feel their mutual sadness as the war pushes them to opposite sides. Although most of the movie focusses on Sarzinsky and his family, and how the world around them disintegrates, I particularly liked Perez's understated performance, who seems just as warm and bemused at the end of the film, as a man living well off of the atrocities of the war, as at the beginning.

Unfortunately, as sniper porn, this movie does little more than whet the appetite. There's a nice scene early on of Sarzinsky and Simic competing at shooting at a match thousands of meters away, and the scene in which Sarzinsky finds and maneuvers his way around the sniper's nest in Sarajevo is well done. But for a movie about snipers, the sniping in this film is pretty perfunctory and predictable, which I think, sadly, can be seen as indicative of the movie overall. This movie's impressiveness and accomplishment comes more from how smoothly it handles its many topics than from particularly inspired handling of any particular one. Shot Through the Heart is one of the best so-so movies that I've seen in a while, and I think that even those not looking specifically for sniper porn will feel the same way.

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A Special Shout-Out to The Vincent Perez Archives; a well-designed site with a wealth of info on Perez and his movies. Good Stuff!!