It’s tough making a war movie in modern times. These days, conflicts are rarely fought along rigid lines, with moral quandaries presenting themselves every so often. That would seem to be right up director Clint Eastwood’s alley – as he’s demonstrated in Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, a pair of battle-heavy films that take a smart, nuanced look at a far less controversial war. But American Sniper doesn’t sit all that comfortably in Eastwood’s canon. This portrait of the late Chris Kyle, America’s self-proclaimed ‘most lethal sniper’, has flashes of depth, but winds up presenting a worryingly simplistic view on some very complicated politics.
Brought up as a rough, ready cowboy, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is badly shaken by terrifying video footage of the 9/11 attack. Resolving to take another route in life, he suits up as a Navy SEAL, and is swiftly dispatched to Iraq just as he marries his girlfriend Taya (Sienna Miller). Once there, Kyle’s tremendous sharp-shooting prowess gains him a reputation as a legend, among his brothers-in-arms as well as the insurgents they are all fighting. As his family grows, both up and away from him, Kyle drifts ever further from his wife and children. As shell-shock sinks into his bones and the target plastered on his own back grows ever larger, he becomes increasingly determined to hunt down Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), an expert sniper taking down his fellow soldiers.
There are moments of dark, bitter brilliance buried within the grim and grit of American Sniper. These come primarily in the tension between the fictional Kyle’s job and his own humanity. In effect, his service to his country requires him to kill: to seek out targets and coolly take them out from the safety of higher ground. When a woman and child run into the path of a tank, the choice is at once obvious and unimaginable: murder, or be murdered. The toll this responsibility takes on Kyle filters into his relationship with Taya – he becomes something akin to an automaton to survive his four tours of Iraq, losing track of his family as he conditions himself to believe that what he does is right.
The problem is really Jason Hall’s screenplay, which is – to put it kindly – a perfunctory mess. Taken solely on its own merits (or lack thereof), it’s full of strange characterisation and awkwardly on-the-nose dialogue. The final film aches to portray Kyle as a hero, but contains odd undertows of doubt about its main character that are never fully explored. The injustices of this war aren’t questioned so much as swept aside, which results in American Sniper celebrating rather than questioning Kyle’s dedication to the cause. Kyle finds himself fighting a people who are casually and almost unilaterally demonised as brutes and radicals, and in fact has a ludicrous, almost superheroic final confrontation with the villainous Mustafa. It’s an unsettling film to watch because its politics and message seem so simple when they should be anything but. Not to mention the fact that the screenplay really isn’t all that accurate as an adaptation of Kyle’s memoirs in the first place.
At least the performances are truly quite interesting. Cooper doesn’t get to display a great deal beyond a certain grim, dark determination, but he does so with a depth you’d never expect from an actor with his CV and sunny good looks. Miller, too, is practically unrecognisable as Taya, a role that becomes, unfortunately, less interesting as the film goes on; in effect, she is increasingly relegated to weeping and rending her garments over Kyle’s exploits. Cooper and Miller are almost – but not really – good enough to convince audiences that they’re fretting over their child in a thoroughly puzzling scene featuring an evidently fake baby.
Whatever its failings as an adaptation, American Sniper is a perfectly watchable film. Eastwood is too seasoned and smart a director to fail in that regard – he wrings dramatic tension as much from a scene in which a former serviceman recognises Kyle back in the States, as from a terrifying moment involving a weeping child and a pneumatic drill. But there’s something curious and not quite right about this war-soaked drama. In plumbing the depths of its titular sharpshooter, it fails to look beyond the man to the conflict in which he’s fighting – a glaring mistake that undermines and, finally, undoes the entire film.
Summary: Sharp-shooting in parts but this is, ultimately, a misfire.
RATING: 2 out of 5 stars
Shawne Wang