Sniper Truck 2: Viva Las Vegas (film)

Sniper Truck 2: Viva Las Vegas is a 1990 action movie, and the second film in the Sniper Truck film series. It was directed by Stephen Hopkins. The film earned over $300 million at the domestic box office, outgrossing its predecessor.

Synopsis
Set five years after the events of the original Sniper Truck, Sniper Truck 2 finds John, retired from sniping, working a legal job with the Department of Defense testing experimental firearms in the Nevada desert.

On a different Nevada military compound, the government is preparing to dispose of a tanker truck worth of nuclear chemicals. An ex-German military extremist named Wolfgang Rogue (Jürgen Prochnow) steals the tanker and heads for the nearest US city, in this case, Las Vegas, looking to destroy it as a terrorist demonstration.

The tanker in question uses technology formerly employed on Sniper Truck. The vehicle is bulletproof, creates its own fuel, and has tracking devices designed to alert the driver in case of an attack. After a Special Forces team is killed trying to take out Rogue, John is called in based on his experiences with the previous Sniper Truck. John heads to Las Vegas, where he reunites with James Armor (Kimbo Slice), and meets a Las Vegas showgirl named Gorgeous (Milla Jovovich) who not only claims to have overheard the location of Rogue's contact in Vegas, but also is the daughter of Arthur Engineer (Elliott Gould), one of the original designers of Sniper Truck.

Development and Production
When it quickly became clear that Sniper Truck would easily become Nu Image and Golan-Globus' most financially successful picture ever, work quickly began on a sequel. Séance Simonsen returned to produce, but original author Brendan M. Leonard left the project, citing "creative differences" over the direction of the sequel compared to his vision of the character. Simonsen then brought in Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. de Souza to take over scripting duties.

Anderson declined to return to the director's chair, stepping back into a producer role in order to turn his focus toward the Mortal Kombat franchise. Predator 2 director Stephen Hopkins was hired in his place. Simonsen also sought actor / singer Deborah Harry for the role of Gorgeous, but she declined, citing other commitments.

Although the first film was considered a risk, the popularity of the original led to several lucrative marketing deals. The most prominent was with Sunkist, which the character of Truck is known to enjoy (one of the few details completely carried over from the books to the films). Cans were branded with images of the characters in one of the first known instances of movie tie-in deals with a beverage company, and cans with these images are sought after by collectors.

Contract negotiations for Snipes threatened to sink the project when the actor demanded a significant pay increase from the original. Eventually a compromise was worked out, netting Snipes a $10 million upfront paycheck and a cut of the film's box office receipts. With an increased budget of $125 million, the film was again shot on location in and around the Las Vegas strip, and in parts of the Nevada desert. The destruction of the MGM Grand was achieved using a 1:15 scale model, with twelve cameras rolling at a high framerate.

A young Mark Ruffalo and Michael Shannon play a pair of sleazy, sexist gamblers who get on John Truck's wrong side early in the film.

Reception
Sniper Truck opened on 3,110 screens and grossing $104.9 million in its first weekend. It finished with a domestic gross of $301.6 million, easily besting the "best-of" record set by the previous film for Nu Image and Golan-Globus. The film also opened a month before de Souza's own Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and performed better than that film at the box office.

Critical response to the sequel was mixed, with many citing the transformation of Snipes' character from a hardened killer to a generic action hero as a disappointment.