He and best friend Slavko Simic, buddies from boyhood, often competed together for the national shooting team and won medals in various Eastern European capitals. When Slavco is called up to serve with the forces of Radovan Karadzic, he not only instructs other snipers but becomes the Bosnian Serbs' most precise killer of once-fellow Sarajevans. He nonetheless remains loyal to his old friend, and twice tries to help Vlado, a Croat, and his Muslim wife flee the besieged city. But even after enemy artillery showers their apartment with glass, the Sarzinskys refuse to leave their hometown. Perhaps because of the skillful, sympathetic evocation of the city and its people, it's easy to identify with his family's disbelief as this friendly, cosmopolitan city rapidly becomes a murderous, rubble-strewn hell.
Nothing is more fiendish than the deaths delivered by the distant Serb snipers.
It just presents the contradictions, Slavco's warmth and loyalty along with his hatred and will to kill, and fuses them in Vincent Perez's appealingly loose, chillingly credible performance. Vlado's motives for turning to violence himself are easier to understand and, among its many virtues, the movie refuses to spin his counter-sniping into a predictable revenge saga. This is a film filled with complex human feeling, finely modulated by its ensemble of adult and child actors. It's not a perfect movie. The script doesn't, for instance, sufficiently explain the rather mysterious group of counter-snipers Vlado joins and helps to train.