American Sniper review

              Like any movie that embraces the moral ambiguities of a particularly controversial war, Clint Eastwood's “American Sniper” is a difficult film to discuss without drifting into reactionary politics or blame-game finger pointing. It becomes all the more difficult when the movie breaks all kinds of records for a January release—infamously understood as an seasonal lull for Hollywood economics—and the public figure who inspired the story, U.S. Navy Seal Chris Kyle, had an equally divisive past that challenges the very ethics of the film's supposed hero. An easier admission to make is that on a technical and aesthetic level this is Eastwood's sharpest and most accomplished film in almost ten years and contains hair-raising sequences that rivals just about anything from his past catalog.

            Based on his autobiography, this movie recounts the life of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), a good ol' boy from Texas who was raised on God, guns and girls, and was personally drawn into military life in 1999 after witnessing on the news the loss of American soldiers overseas. Because his daddy taught him that there are only three types of men, the sheep (the weak and the stupid), the predators (the aggressors) and the sheep dogs (protectors of the weak), Kyle makes it his personal mission to keep his fellow soldiers on the battle field safe, creating a superman complex that would increasingly haunt his psyche once America was called to action in the middle-east. His wife Taya (Sienna Miller) does her best to raise their children alone while Chris does four successive tours in the war-torn streets of Iraq, leaving the bulk of their relationship attended over voice mails and the occasional phone call.

            Locked within a distinctly American depiction of a troubled war started on shaky reasoning and based on a book that was written by a man who posthumously lost a defamation case against a blow-hard Minnesota wrestler turned governor, this film struggles to be everything for everyone. It wants to do right by the now deceased soldier, who, while protecting the lives of his fellow troops was responsible for the deaths of over 160 enemies, including women and children. At the same time, while never showing his duties as anything but well-intended and heroic, the film also surrounds Kyle with multiple characters who question the logic of the war their fighting and their value within it.

            During the emotional climax, when Kyle finally faces off against an Iraqi sniper who killed many of his best friends, the battle field is struck by a blinding sand storm, which seems to suggest a divine or natural dissension over the mounting violence justified by earthly ideologies... Or maybe it doesn't mean that at all, but because of the movie's vague and waffling point of view it only augments the individual viewer's political leanings. Whether you walk into this thinking it's a pro-war propaganda piece, an anti-war character study, or a patriotic tribute to a lost American folk hero, you'll ultimately leave with your original judgments and expectations intact.

            Questionable thematics aside, nobody should deny Eastwood's return to form here, as he demonstrates that he can carefully and sensitively build tension within each high-stakes shootout and create a palpable haze of paranoia over the final scenes where Chris Kyle can barely make sense of his civilian life after returning home to raise his family. Likewise, Bradley Cooper is fully committed to the role and plays the charismatic sniper without any apology and bravely lets the audience into the mind of his character's fractured world-view. Unfortunately we can never truly know if the internal struggle that complicates the ideological mine field exists outside of the dramatic padding of this movie universe.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2015