AMERICAN SNIPER

The following review attempts to leave out any bias for Chris Kyle, the US Military, the Left, the Right, and focus purely on the cinematic aspects of this film. You can read my personal thoughts on the controversy surrounding the film here. 

The controversy surrounding American Sniper made me extremely curious to check out Clint Eastwood’s latest film. The 84-year-old director scored the biggest box office opening of his directorial career telling the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in American Military history with 160 confirmed kills. He was tragically killed at a gun range helping a fellow veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The film is based on his book of the same name.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that if you wanted to create suspense, an imperfect way to do so would be to have men sitting around a table and then suddenly, the blast of a bomb having been hidden beneath the table goes off. Instead, one must first see the bomb, then have the men enter the room, proceed to talk for a while, then have the explosion.

Eastwood employs the latter method in the opening of his film, showing us the moral dilemma of Chris Kyle’s first potential kill he is viewing from a perch above the action below: a child being handed a grenade to use against oncoming American troops. The film never goes any further than what is mentioned above to create true tension between Kyle and a man known as Mustafa (played by Sammy Sheik), the Iraqi equivalent of the titular American Sniper.  He is a silent killing machine that exists in the context of the film only to play spin the bullet (I’m not kidding) and conveniently kill characters necessary for the plot to move forward. 

Mustafa is a prime example of the two dimensionality of the film’s Middle Eastern protagonists. At this point in the film, I questioned whether this was done on purpose. I will never know what it's like to experience combat from the perspective of a Navy SEAL, but for those guys, it was probably a kill or be killed mentality that returned many to their families. It's rumored that when Steven Spielberg was attached to direct the project, he wanted to explore the psychological aspects of both the Chris Kyle and Mustafa, but this was unable to come to fruition due to time and budget constraints.

Sienna Miller delivers a great performance as Taya, Kyle’s wife, with the amount of material she is given to deal with. The only memorable moments in her performance are questioning why the father of her children chooses to go off to Iraq and fight an enemy thousands of miles away instead of building a relationship with his newborn children. All attention is focused on Kyle himself; after all it is his film. I found myself getting my hopes up for a psychological exploration behind the moral questions raised by killing people for his country. 

Instead, a great performance from Bradley Cooper attempted to compensate for very bland characters. There is no question about Cooper owning this film from start to finish. For those who know what the true life Chris Kyle looked and sounded like (the man appeared on a few talk shows to promote his book when it was released in 2012), it’s a no brainer why the Academy gave him his 3^rd consecutive Oscar nomination for this performance. His voice is pitched differently, the characterized Texan accent is pretty darn good, and his usual trim physique is hidden beneath 225 pounds of bulk Cooper put on for the role.

One of the most striking scenes comes as a sandstorm looms on the horizon and Chris Kyle finally reaches the breaking point of servitude. Eastwood manages to cleverly sneak in a nod to the flashback within the opening of the film as he leaves behind one life for another. An impending storm means impending doom, not only because Kyle and his team are surrounded by hostile enemies, but because it is in this inescapable fate that he realizes that he didn't have to put himself through this. It is the closest we get to a look into the man's psyche, something I was dying to see instead of an Iraqi fighting against, then helping, then turning back against US soldiers. 

Instead of showing us a potentially heart breaking battle to return to normalcy once back in the US, writer Jason Hall writes off Kyle’s PTSD as a passing thought late in the third act. Again, I'm not kidding. Eastwood’s film strives for greatness, but never truly achieves or clearly gets across its Pro-Veteran, anti-war statement due to its flimsy script.

 6/10