AMERICAN SNIPER – The Review

Most combat troops want to get it over with and go home, but Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who had a terrifyingly dangerous job as a sniper, nobly embarked on four tours of duty in Iraq where he was credited with over 160 confirmed kills. The new film AMERICAN SNIPER dutifully chronicles Kyle’s life from his boyhood in Texas, to how he met his wife Taya and recreates the highlights of his military career (and even makes up a few!). Bulked up, bearded, and somewhat inarticulate, Bradley Cooper’s terrific performance as Kyle is not built on speeches. When it’s over, little has been said in so many words, but we have a pretty clear idea of why Kyle needed to shoot people. 1) He was motivated by his father’s adage that the world is divided into three types of people: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs, 2) These were evil people who needed to be shot, and 3) No one’s aim was truer than Chris Kyle, who quickly earned the nickname “The Legend”.

AMERICAN SNIPER is from director Clint Eastwood, a master of telling stories about men and women who choose to be in physical danger, and is a conventional biography done right. It’s a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they’re doing and why. The camera work by Eastwood regular Tom Stern services the story. Eastwood has always known that you can’t build suspense with shots lasting one or two seconds. And you can’t tell a story that way, either. Eastwood shows us not only the violence but its human consequences and he’s careful to paint Kyle in a complicated light. The film opens with Kyle forced to make the decision whether to take out both a mother and her young son as they approach U.S. forces with what he suspects is a grenade. It’s an unbearably tense scene and a bold way to introduce Kyle. This scene repeats an hour into the film, this time with more background info but no less intensity. Shooting people from a distance is Kyle’s job and it’s not always an exciting one. He’s forced to lie undetected for hours at a time, peeing himself because he can’t move. In one scene, he impatiently pulls himself off rooftop duty to get in on the action with a door-to-door canvas in the hunt for terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’. Eastwood is especially good on the disorientation and of stalking the fragged ruins of Baghdad, where everyone — be they child or adult — is a potential trigger. A battle in the middle a blinding sandstorm so fierce neither audience nor participants can see much is the type of sequence a lesser director would have botched into mass confusion.

The somber final act of AMERICAN SNIPER chronicles Kyle’s postwar civilian life where he provided target shooting therapy for soldiers who came home in much worse physical and mental shape than he. All of the stateside sequences may be filler between the Iraq tours, but they’re well done and give the audience a chance to catch its breath, especially a moving, well-acted scene in a tire shop where a one-legged soldier confronts a humble Kyle, thanking him for saving his life. Sienna Miller as Taya is fine in a role that never degenerates into the put-upon wife, though that’s exactly what she is. Miller nicely pulls off hysteria in a tough scene where she’s on the phone long-distance with her husband when he’s suddenly caught in the middle of a firefight. AMERICAN SNIPER has been criticized from some for Kyle’s perceived bloodthirstiness and general indifference to the Iraqis and their country (an attitude stronger in Kyle’s memoirs), but the geopolitics of the Middle East are not on Eastwood or screenwriter Jason Hall’s mind, nor are the straightforward slings and arrows of the modern combat flick. This film is one man’s story, and because movies are such a curiously voyeuristic form, we identify with heroes like Kyle and accept their actions, at least as long as the film runs. Afterward, there may be some hard questions to answer, but not about Kyle’s sacrifice nor the filmmaking skills of Clint Eastwood. I did not see AMERICAN SNIPER before I turned in my 2014 ‘Top Ten’ list, but it deserves a spot near the top.

5 of 5 Stars