American Sniper review - Shot Through the Heart

So Clint Eastwood's new film, American Sniper, has been hitting it big at the box office and at the awards shows. In case you're wondering if the film deserves all the hype, the answer is no. Not even a little bit. 

American Sniper is based on the true story of Chris Kyle, played here by Bradley Cooper. This man is known as the most lethal sniper in U.S. history, and what Clint Eastwood and Jason Hall assembled is an adaptation of his autobiography. and a very direct one at that. Unfortunately, it turns out that Kyle isn't very good biopic material. In fact, without any particular statement to drive it, American Sniper comes across as more than a little pointless. This is due mostly to the fact that Kyle actually lived a fairly uninteresting life, mostly being analogous to a generic war hero character and holding views that, shown without comment, are more than a little uninteresting. Kyle is depicted as having post-traumatic stress disorder later in the movie, and this has negative results on his family, but this never really amounts to anything, ultimately being dropped at the end of the movie with a thud. Yet, at the same time, the movie's refusal to comment on any aspect of Cooper's life results in Kyle's ideological slant being the most prevalent, which means pro-war patriotism. These two threads sit together uneasily, preventing the movie from actually possessing any meaningful commentary. 

Thankfully, though, Cooper plays Kyle well. When the aforementioned PTSD comes into play, the stress can be seen on Cooper's face, whereas in other times it's fittingly absent. In later tours of Iraq, Cooper appears uneasy, but hides it in the presence of his fellow soldiers. It's a strong performance, albeit one where the actor has little to work with. Cooper also looks the part, 

Chris' wife, Taya, played by Sienna Miller, isn't allowed much room to exist independently of her husband. Showing a little more of Taya's life might have spiced up the film a bit, but instead she's increasingly pushed to the sidelines as the film progresses. All of her scenes are reactions to Chris, and even those it's hard to care about because the initial romance between the two falls flat. This accounts for half the set up, yet it's skimmed over in order to make room for more pointless boot camp scenes that do nothing to advance the plot. Without these characters' bond being further established, it's hard to care a whole lot beyond the inherently affecting events in the story. I don't know if all of this is how Chris Kyle wrote it, but American Sniper does a piss-poor job pacing them out. This is a problem in the rest of the movie, too. We get painfully small glimpses at Chris' PTSD and the effect on his family, then it's back to seeing more terrorists getting shot. 

And Eastwood directs a lot of shooting. The sheer amount of shooting in this movie is reminiscent of an action movie, but the "action scenes" are so laboriously paced, so pointless, and so self-serious that they're never fun enough to be worthy of the genre. And yet, if we take the movie as a pure drama, these scenes hold no dramatic weight and serve no purpose within the story. Regardless of how they're approached, the long stretches of military action in American Sniper are simply boring. Too often in the film, we're shown things that don't matter and that nobody really cares about. Without a strong development of the PTSD angle, seeing Chris Kyle killing people isn't interesting. 

The vast majority of Iraqi characters turn out to be terrorists, and those who don't are still connected to al-Qaeda in some way. While this may simply be due to the fact that these Iraqis were simply the most important ones to Kyle's story, the contrast with the mostly White people we're shown in Kyle's division and at places where Kyle visits at home is a tiny bit uncomfortable. And this isn't just me reading it this way: This film has apparently inspired anti-Muslim sentiment among some viewers. Kyle's repeat references to "savages" probably refers solely to the insurgents he was fighting, but it's not unreasonable to be uncomfortable with such statements. 

There is some potential in American Sniper, if only any part of it was developed further. Last year I praised the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself for enhancing the source material with additional information. I'm not saying that American Sniper needed to include interview footage, but perhaps adding anything, anything aside from the base facts related to Chris would make the film considerably more interesting. As it stands, the film is left without any feeling of purpose, and it's hard to hold much interest in something like that. 

Why is this nominated for Best Picture again? 

4/10