Hulu’s tense new sniper thriller has an excellent gimmick

Martial arts movie legend Scott Adkins was in four different movies in 2024 — a not unusual state of affairs for the famously prolific action star. Two of them — One More Shot and The Killer’s Game — got the lion’s share of Adkins fan attention, and understandably so: One was a very good sequel to the successful and well-liked One Shot, and the other was a Dave Bautista-led theatrical release directed by action genius and stunt guy extraordinaire J.J. Perry. But lost in that conversation was Adkins’ solid sniper thriller Take Cover, which is now on Hulu and well worth your time. Like One More Shot, Take Cover is a 2024 Adkins project built on a very well-executed gimmick. One More Shot, like One Shot before it, is an action movie presented in one continuous take, this time moving the action to an airport with great success. Meanwhile, Take Cover is set almost entirely inside an all-glass penthouse, where sniper Sam Lorde (Adkins) and a small group of people are trapped by a sniper in another building who is trying to kill them. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol475b54NcY] That setup allows for a tense sniper thriller to unfold. While it starts a little slow, Take Cover really sings once it gets the setup out of the way. Director Nick McKinless — a veteran stunt performer who has worked on Andor and Game of Thrones and was the stunt coordinator on Horizon Zero Dawn — makes his feature directing debut and makes great use of the location, turning everyday objects into life-or-death sniper cover. Lorde and the rest of the trapped people have to come up with creative solutions to move around the penthouse without attracting attention, using furniture as cover and coming up with distractions to temporarily divert the sniper’s gaze. The real highlight is how McKinless uses the penthouse’s blinds as a source of tension before the shooting starts — because we know the premise of the movie but the characters don’t, the back-and-forth of people deciding whether to open or close the blinds of the giant glass windows is nearly unbearable in the best way possible. The story’s twists and turns are somewhat predictable, but I didn’t mind. The stuck-in-one-room gimmick adequately provides the tension you’d want from this kind of action thriller, but Take Cover also includes a philosophical streak that I found surprisingly affecting. Before he gets to the penthouse, Lorde begins the movie on an assignment to assassinate an infamous weapons dealer. But when the weapons dealer’s partner throws herself in front of the bullet to save his life, it throws Lorde completely for a loop. He had self-justified his career by saying he’s only killing the worst people in the world. But if someone loved this man enough to give her life for him, wouldn’t there have to have been some value in his life? It’s the kind of thoughtful question you don’t often expect in this kind of straightforward, 90-minute action thriller, but Adkins, McKinless, and screenwriter Joshua Todd James pull it off, adding an extra layer of depth to the movie without distracting from the tension and action. Adkins has made a career out of trimmed-down, small-budget genre vehicles. Take Cover doesn’t quite rise to the heights of his very best work, like the Undisputed or Debt Collector series, but it’s a worthy addition to the canon of Adkins DTV bangers. Take Cover is now streaming on Hulu.