Warner Bros. Pictures
Rewind Movie Review is a feature where I review a movie I haven’t yet reviewed, but I didn’t see in the theater. Today: American Sniper.
So way back in December of 2014 I had a chance to see American Sniper a bit early. At that point, I didn’t know it was based on a book based on a true story, or that that true story was the focus of some controversy. I didn’t know that the movie’s protagonist died in real life, so the ending was a bit of a shock to me. Since then, there have been a few thousand think pieces on the movie, questioning its verisimilitude, its morality, whether or not it’s good at all. But that all came as a surprise to me, because I expected a lot better from Clint Eastwood than this movie, which I don’t think is really close to his best work.
I expected a lot better from Clint Eastwood than this movie. tweet
American Sniper, based on the book of the same name, tells the story of Chris Kyle, the sniper with the “record” for most kills. Bradley Cooper bulked up to play Chris, and despite what I think about anything else, I think he did a great job. Sienna Miller plays Chris’ wife Taya, and I didn’t really feel it worked for me. Whether it was a combination of performance and writing or just one of those, I didn’t really see Taya as anything other than “generic army wife who’s worried.. I found the afterword she wrote in the book about the movie-making process a lot more interesting and evocative to her personality than anything in the movie.
But it’s weird; the movie didn’t really seem to care about the family other than as a point of drama and concern. A counterpoint to the destruction and death while Chris is on tour in Iraq. The movie starts with a jolt, an out of place flashback where a young Chris is taught to shoot by his father. This part of the movie was boring, because it seemed so simplistic. Now that I know it’s fairly accurate to Chris’ real life, I wonder why it wasn’t made more interesting to watch. After the US embassy bombings in 1998, Chris joined the military, and then later he met and married Taya. Once again, this character building seemed slipshod and less important than the battlefield.
How am I supposed to care about Chris, I ask myself, if I don’t really know about why he’s doing anything? Instead, we get “he grew up shooting” and “he wanted to defend America,” which might as well be a thousand soldiers. Finally he goes to Iraq after September 11th, oddly paced in the movie, which seems to imply no time passed at all between the World Trade Center attacks and the mission in Iraq which was over a year later. A political point or just efficient storytelling? I don’t know the answer to that, because Clint Eastwood hasn’t said one way or the other.
Eventually Chris gets into combat situations, claiming his first kills, often difficult ones like women or children who are also combatants. It gets harder and more complicated, as Chris seems to find it easier to kill but harder to deal with his life back home. There are two sort of antagonists in the movie, a man called “The Butcher” who tortures civilians against American interests and a fictional anti-Chris Iraqi sniper called “Mustafa.” That part seemed kind of silly measured against the cruelty and horror of the Butcher.
Now it’s funny; I’ve seen some reviews complain that Chris was too blasé about things, but it seems to me that both the movie and Bradley Cooper clearly demonstrated how messed up Chris was because of the war. Whether it was true in real life, I couldn’t say; his book is a biased perspective after all, and I need to view this in terms of what it is: a movie. To me, the slow parts with his wife should’ve been the critical counterweights to Chris’ excellent skill at killing combatants, but that part seemed too simplistic and slow. Almost like the movie just wanted to hurry it up and take too much time at once, because it knew his family life matters to his story yet it doesn’t seem to care about it.
This movie isn’t the greatest movie of all time … it’s just kinda okay. tweet
In two sentences: This movie isn’t the greatest movie of all time but it’s not utter trash either, it’s just kinda okay. Bradley Cooper is actually excellent, but the script lets him down.
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