American Sniper

Released:  December 25^th, 2014

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

Directed by:  Clint Eastwood

Written by:  Jason Hall

Personal Bias Alert:  likes war movies, wary of jingoism

7.2 of 10

            After playing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas for three weeks, American Sniper has finally hit theaters nationwide.  I assume this stall was to avoid competing with Unbroken, whose success seems only to have revved up anticipation for Sniper.  It’s expected to do boffo business in its opening weekend, breaking the box office record for January and giving quality-starved movie fans a bit of relief.

            Following the military career of the most lethal sniper in American history, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the film could have gone a few different ways.  It could’ve been a gritty, realistic portrayal of modern warfare, a jingoist celebration of a dedicated SEAL, or a character study of an inevitably haunted man.  Director Clint Eastwood went with a mixture of the former and the latter, delivering a solid, albeit simple story of a uniquely horrific war and the toll it took on one of its most successful combatants.

            The movie thrives in the battlefields of Iraq, where Kyle seems the most sure of himself and, oddly, the most comfortable.  Little time is spent outside of the missions, giving viewers a taste of how all-encompassing the job must’ve seemed.  The actual war sequences, which range from stationary sniper missions, home infiltrations, and street-careening Humvee deployments, are well-executed, ratcheting up the intensity in deceptively different ways without devolving into character-less set pieces.  If Kyle truly was as obsessed with his duties as this movie portrays, then American Sniper does an excellent job of establishing why he might’ve felt that way.

            Cooper, who’s been with the project since its inception, is the other big plus here.  He’s clearly very comfortable with the material and delivers the emotions in a tamped-down way that rings true for a Navy SEAL.  Really, his eyes are the most striking thing about his performance.  They fade as the movie wears on, losing the twinkle we’ve come to expect from the lively star.  By the end, he’s a weighed-down man, one who perhaps better understands the impact of his decisions and makes them more cautiously.  Kyle never was and never becomes a complicated man (he loves his wife, his country, and Texas), but that doesn’t mean he was lacking in regrets.

            Giving viewers this focused portrait of Kyle was surely difficult, but it doesn’t excuse the lack of attention given to the rest of the story.  Nearly everyone else who appears is a stock character, with his wife played by Sienna Miller being the only one to get any extra treatment.  Still, she’s nothing more than Kyle’s wife and mother of his children, and she gets stuck in many of the clunky PTSD scenes that could’ve been ripped from a TV movie.  That’s disappointing, especially after their meet-cute at a bar was handled so well by both Miller and Cooper.

            Really, everything that takes place outside of Iraq is lazily handled.  Plotlines are dropped and never heard from again, points are made through obvious exposition, and the ending happens far too fast.  This is a film that takes its time depicting war but rushes everything else.  Yes, there’s time constraints to take into consideration, but there are a few useless threads (like a bland rival sniper) that could’ve been cut to make room. 

None of these drawbacks take away from Cooper and Eastwood’s portrait of Kyle, but it certainly holds the film back from being anything more.  No larger statements on the War on Terror or war in general is made, nor do I think they were trying to.  More alarmingly, it doesn’t comment much on Kyle himself.  The insights that are made are fairly straightforward, feeling like the kind of mid-level observations you can throw out about yourself, which in this case almost certainly came from Kyle’s book, instead of the more honest and sometimes painful connections that only an outsider can make.  There’s many high-quality elements in American Sniper, but this lack of depth keeps it from being truly great.

            Other Notes:

Ø  Several pieces have been written calling into question the accuracy of this film.  This is a rubbish argument, because the film’s a fictionalized version of events, not a documentary.

Ø  As a warning, this does get rather violent.

Ø  It was kind of distracting that I recognized Jonathan Groff in his scene, but he did nail it.

Ø  Kyle’s book:  American Sniper:  The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History