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AMERICAN SNIPER Send This Review to a Friend
The combination of the skills of director Clint Eastwood and actor Bradley Cooper results in an exceptionally powerful anti-war movie that grips us and repels us as we watch the devastation against targets and the emotional toll on the shooter portrayed. Eastwood commendably saw the potential in the original source, an autobiography by Chris Kyle, with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Jason Hall provided the perceptive screenplay adaptation.
Kyle is the real-life character whom Cooper brilliantly plays. I recently saw Cooper on stage in “The Elephant Man” (see review under Theater), and the contrast between his performances illustrates what a superb actor he is.
In “American Sniper” we watch him evolve from a patriotic young man yearning to see action for his country, his training as a Navy Seal to eventually being shipped over to Iraq and positioned as a deadly accurate sniper. We see him fix on the enemy via his gun site, with his finger ready to press the trigger at the right moment. Presto. The enemy falls. If necessary he will kill an armed woman or a boy, although in one harrowing scene he hopes desperately that the boy will drop the weapon he has picked up. Kyle was credited with 160 confirmed kills and earned the nickname Legend.
Eastwood captures the grisly business of Iraq warfare, including a scene in which a fed-up soldier remarks on the war’s futility. The action sequences are blistering. But the essence of the film is to see the toll taken whether subtly or not so subtly on Kyle.
Intimate personal scenes evolve from Kyle’s meeting Taya (Sienna Miller), the woman whom he marries, and the loneliness and urgency she feels when he is away from home and his determination to go back with one tour after another—four in all. Being a sniper is in his blood emotionally, and he hungers for action, as well as feels loyalty to his comrades-in-arms.
The ending of the film noting what ultimately happened to Kyle has its irony. By then we have been exposed to the war arena and to the grim home-coming realities. “American Sniper" is an intelligent, forceful film that will be hard to forget and that further burnishes Eastwood’s reputation as a director. A Warner Brothers release. Reviewed December 25, 2014.
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