American Sniper was the box office surprise of 2014 as it blew past all expectations to surpass Saving Private Ryan as the highest grossing war movie of all time.
Upon viewing the Oscar-nominated film, it’s easy to see why: American Sniper is the prototypical American war picture. It has it all: action, tension, big explosions, bad guys and a bonafide real-life “hero” in Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle.
It’s also a difficult movie to classify, mainly because it’s very unclear on what it wants to be. American Sniper has scenes that reek of propaganda in their unapologetic exploitability, while other scenes are right out of an old-fashioned good vs. bad action movie. But at its essence, American Sniper is a character study. A really bad one.
Based on the best-selling autobiography published a year before Chris Kyle’s death, American Sniper attempts to capture the mindset of a man dead set in his beliefs and worldview. Kyle sees the war in Iraq as a cosmic battle between good and evil and his role as a warrior and protector in that eternal fight. It is a belief informed, as far as this movie is concerned, by a stereotypical American upbringing and mentality.
But Kyle’s viewpoint is a polarizing one: it’s him vs. the world. Kyle’s beliefs are challenged by virtually every other character in the film, all of whom don’t truly understand him. His wife simply wants his safe return and sees nothing else. Soldiers revere Kyle, but they can’t comprehend the emotional toll killing dozens of Iraqis, including women and children, has on his psyche. You’ll hear characters saying the war’s a lie and only about oil but it’s all fog that fails to impede Kyle’s mission. It’s a mission he’s willing to see through to the bitter end.
This is all well and good, but the movie version of Kyle is such a simplistic caricature that any impact or heft the film could have had is wasted. American Sniper is drama-lite, a pretender posing as a serious film on challenging subjects and yet it uses every cinematic trick in the book to stir emotions and rouse the audience. Director Clint Eastwood spoon feeds the audience what to think and feel so they don’t have to worry about it.
American Sniper ambles along with zero subtlety or nuance; everything is bluntly placed right there to be taken at face value. The film robotically checks off scenes establishing various character motivations. Why does Kyle have a deeply instilled protective instinct? An early childhood analogy involving sheep, wolves and sheepdogs delivered by his father sort of explains that. Why does Kyle join the army? Because 9/11. Why does he become a sniper? Because he’s always been good at shooting. Why does he get married and have kids? To add another plot obstacle. And the entire film proceeds with this meandering quixotic tempo, as it jumps around from his early life to his military training and through four tours of service in Iraq with no real discernible structure.
The film just isn’t interested in reality. The characters are cardboard thin, the Iraqis are either boogeymen or civilians to be slaughtered, and the action scenes become increasingly ridiculous and contrived. Kyle’s mission eventually boils down to a fabricated pitched battle between him and a fictitious enemy sniper dubbed ‘Mustafa’, which seems to have only been done to stir audiences numbed by the repetitive and dragged out exposition.
Verdict: But what to take from American Sniper when the end credits roll with real life images of Kyle’s funeral procession playing in the background? At the bare minimum, you’re meant to appreciate what makes a soldier tasked with an impossible role like Kyle tick. Bradley Cooper may have looked and sounded the part, but we’re still left pondering what he may have felt and thought. All the big questions are left unanswered and everything else is reduced and oversimplified. In a confusing and complex world, Kyle still remains a misunderstood and half-baked American ‘hero’, and this film accomplishes nothing more than milking another couple hundred million bucks out of his memory.
Trailer:
Published in MoviePulse on Apr. 22, 2015. Original version here.
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