Yes, it's not a historical drama, but credibility about the milieu is a must even for action movies, otherwise they may easily get ridiculous, like this one.
1. Hungary is (was) a neighbor to ex-Yugoslavia, but never part of it. So Hungary was also absolutely out of the ethnic conflicts and remained greatly neutral throughout.
2. We should imagine the whole movie happens in Serbia (the biggest of the successor-states of ex-Yugoslavia), however, everybody talks Hungarian, which doesn't even sound alike. (Serbian language belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European family of languages, while Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric group of Ural-Altaic family. Different grammar, different pronunciation, different intonation, different rhythm, not a word in common). It may not matter for the Americans, but Eastern Europe (even tens of millions in Western Europe) clearly understand the difference.
2/a. On top of this, the written Serbian is using Cyrillic letters, while Hungarian is using Latin letters (with certain vowels bearing special accents). Whatever is written in the street scenes of the movie - e.g. the "Szent Erzsébet" (Saint Elizabeth)statue in front of the cathedral - is written in Latin letters in Hungarian language.
3. The Serbians are basically orthodox catholic by majority, while the Hungarians are basically Roman catholic. The cathedral bearing a central role in the movie has no connection to anything in a typical orthodox church in Serbia.
4. All cars in the streets bear Hungarian license plates, showing the country code (H) and Hungary's national flag left of the 3-letter/3-digit combination of license plates.
4/a. All military vehicles in the movie have Hungarian military license plates.
5. To make a street scene, which the movie-makers believed as typical, they collected and showed all kinds of lousy Eastern-European cars (even including the infamous Polish van called Zuk), but no Western cars even by mistake. Such street picture was typical in Hungary up to the early 80s and in Yugoslavia up to mid-70s, whilst the story is happening in late-90s.
5/a Only one car does not appear in the whole movie: the Yugoslavian-made Zastava, the newer models of which were still in quite a quantity in the streets of Serbia in the late-90s.
6. The Serbian police cars, which are hit and blown by the tram in the movie, are all of East-German-made Wartburgs (3-cylinder/2-stroke engine). Yugoslavian/Serbian police never had a Wartburg (unless a few sample/test cars, which I may not know). The typical Yugoslavian police car was locally built Zastava (originally Fiat-based cars), but in the late-90s (when the story is played) there were already hundreds of thousands of Western cars in Yugoslavia and even the police had many.
7. The tram-cars are of Hungarian-built UV models, never exported to any country (not even to Yugoslavia) and they have Hungarian route-boards installed on their noses.
You don't need to make a historical drama to be correct about elementary basics like geography, era and ethnography of your story and not to mix up everything into a terrible and greatly stereotyped mess. Being a European, it doesn't matter what is happening in the movie, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry as it is completely impossible to empathize the story under such visual and verbal circumstances.
When we make a movie which story is playing in New York, we don't show agave fields instead of Central Square with people in sombreros, eating chili con carne and taco in the streets and drinking tequila in the bars, even though Mexico is the neighboring country to the USA. So the American makers may have believed the whole world is completely stupid and believes what they think a stereotyped Eastern Europe should be, however, for us living in this region, it is like a direct insult. So I believe it is a big mistake to play this movie in European TV channels (it is also a mistake to play it in the rest of the world because it is misleading people and don't give any realistic background about real Serbian milieu, but at least non-Europeans don't know all those mistakes).
Finally, compare this cheap lousy nonsense with Evita, the street scenes of which were also filmed in the streets of Budapest instead of Buenos Aires, but you cannot catch it because all details properly fit.
Big shame on the producers of Sniper-2 !!!
1. Hungary is (was) a neighbor to ex-Yugoslavia, but never part of it. So Hungary was also absolutely out of the ethnic conflicts and remained greatly neutral throughout.
2. We should imagine the whole movie happens in Serbia (the biggest of the successor-states of ex-Yugoslavia), however, everybody talks Hungarian, which doesn't even sound alike. (Serbian language belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European family of languages, while Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric group of Ural-Altaic family. Different grammar, different pronunciation, different intonation, different rhythm, not a word in common). It may not matter for the Americans, but Eastern Europe (even tens of millions in Western Europe) clearly understand the difference.
2/a. On top of this, the written Serbian is using Cyrillic letters, while Hungarian is using Latin letters (with certain vowels bearing special accents). Whatever is written in the street scenes of the movie - e.g. the "Szent Erzsébet" (Saint Elizabeth)statue in front of the cathedral - is written in Latin letters in Hungarian language.
3. The Serbians are basically orthodox catholic by majority, while the Hungarians are basically Roman catholic. The cathedral bearing a central role in the movie has no connection to anything in a typical orthodox church in Serbia.
4. All cars in the streets bear Hungarian license plates, showing the country code (H) and Hungary's national flag left of the 3-letter/3-digit combination of license plates.
4/a. All military vehicles in the movie have Hungarian military license plates.
5. To make a street scene, which the movie-makers believed as typical, they collected and showed all kinds of lousy Eastern-European cars (even including the infamous Polish van called Zuk), but no Western cars even by mistake. Such street picture was typical in Hungary up to the early 80s and in Yugoslavia up to mid-70s, whilst the story is happening in late-90s.
5/a Only one car does not appear in the whole movie: the Yugoslavian-made Zastava, the newer models of which were still in quite a quantity in the streets of Serbia in the late-90s.
6. The Serbian police cars, which are hit and blown by the tram in the movie, are all of East-German-made Wartburgs (3-cylinder/2-stroke engine). Yugoslavian/Serbian police never had a Wartburg (unless a few sample/test cars, which I may not know). The typical Yugoslavian police car was locally built Zastava (originally Fiat-based cars), but in the late-90s (when the story is played) there were already hundreds of thousands of Western cars in Yugoslavia and even the police had many.
7. The tram-cars are of Hungarian-built UV models, never exported to any country (not even to Yugoslavia) and they have Hungarian route-boards installed on their noses.
You don't need to make a historical drama to be correct about elementary basics like geography, era and ethnography of your story and not to mix up everything into a terrible and greatly stereotyped mess. Being a European, it doesn't matter what is happening in the movie, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry as it is completely impossible to empathize the story under such visual and verbal circumstances.
When we make a movie which story is playing in New York, we don't show agave fields instead of Central Square with people in sombreros, eating chili con carne and taco in the streets and drinking tequila in the bars, even though Mexico is the neighboring country to the USA. So the American makers may have believed the whole world is completely stupid and believes what they think a stereotyped Eastern Europe should be, however, for us living in this region, it is like a direct insult. So I believe it is a big mistake to play this movie in European TV channels (it is also a mistake to play it in the rest of the world because it is misleading people and don't give any realistic background about real Serbian milieu, but at least non-Europeans don't know all those mistakes).
Finally, compare this cheap lousy nonsense with Evita, the street scenes of which were also filmed in the streets of Budapest instead of Buenos Aires, but you cannot catch it because all details properly fit.
Big shame on the producers of Sniper-2 !!!