Review: American Sniper (2014)
Chris Kyle, the subject of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, is by official standards the most lethal sniper in US military history. He has over 150 confirmed kills to prove it, and to both the film and the man himself, that’s all these seem to be — kills. Faceless, nameless, inhuman figures, proverbial tally marks on his rifle that seem to serve as our indicator of what a hero he is.
As a genre about mass-scale violence and trauma, war movies are almost unavoidably teeming with bloodshed and an array of other unpleasantries, but what gives the genre its profundity and its raison d’être is how the turmoil can facilitate psychologically and emotionally insightful and compelling ideas. If a war film fails to reach these depths of insight, then it might at least appeal to the inner savage in all of us, that carnal desire to revel in cinematic violence, symphonies of bullets, the aesthetic delights of gunplay and explosions.
But what happens when a war film has the macabre qualities necessary for the genre without any of the catharsis or entertainment value? We get something along the lines of American Sniper, a film whose emotional core is built on such a phony façade, and whose action scenes are so familiar and incessant that it feels closer to propaganda or video game cut-scene filler than the powerful and inspiring film that it allegedly is.
American Sniper is composed of two narrative halves that flip back and forth in orderly fashion, Chris Kyle’s life at home with his wife, and his four tours of duty in the Middle East. Except, there’s a surprisingly dark bit of childhood backstory to start the film and then never reemerge, and in reality, the war “halves” comprise the vast majority of the film, leaving what little remains feeling undernourished and, like the first section, essentially unnecessary. Chris Kyle is a Texas cowboy with an affinity for target shooting and a deep-seated sense of patriotism that is ignited the instant he sees the World Trade Center’s collapse on the TV news. He meets a pretty girl at a bar, wins her over, takes her home, and then marries her, whether out of love or because of her pregnancy.
That’s really all we know about him, because during the time-hogging war scenes, he exudes only the type of battle buddy chatter and surface-level distress that one expects from every single war film in existence. The politics and particulars of his military operations are kept simple, which prevents any potential confusion stemming from too many proper nouns being thrown around, but also omits any sense of reality, weight, or sense of purpose here.
It never feels like a film about an American out to do a necessary evil in protecting the citizens of his country against a clever and motivated enemy, as much as the film tries to convince us of that, and us much as Kyle himself truly believed that. It just feels like cowboys and Indians in the Middle East, or Cops and Robbers, or some other childish game of absolute good and absolute evil without the slightest admittance that war is never so simple.
As the film progresses and Kyle’s service rolls on and on, we expect it to take a toll, and to an extent, it does. His absence is an emotional burden on his wife and children (one of whom is a plastic doll, apparently) and his time home is marred by constant paranoia and disconnect from tranquil life, but the film refuses to acknowledge these as the serious, troubling signs that they are. Kyle’s constant return to active military duty is obviously problematic and indicative of psychological distress, but Eastwood seems to wholeheartedly embrace Kyle’s ignorant beliefs that what he’s doing is a heroic and essential endeavor, one that he is specifically responsible for. His wife (written as a classic female non-character) begs him to stay, telling him that he’s failing as a father and a husband, and that his real duty is to be there for them, not risking his life in faraway places for less than scrupulous causes.
As right as she is, the film just sort of ignores the all of the implications of abandonment here, jumping back into run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen battle scenes before the characters actually have a chance to behave like human beings. Bradley Cooper as Kyle is the only actor actually given a chance to act here, and he performs pretty much competently, for what he was given to work with.
That the film is seen almost exclusively from his perspective is understandable, but that each and every Arab “savage” (as the soldiers casually denote them) is either a hysterical nuisance or a hysterical terrorist perpetuates negative stereotypes in a fashion that could have been simply avoided had the film been willing to even acknowledge the existence of rational and innocent Iraqis, but no. Just as the home scenes are plagued by a lack of any sort of humanity, the film was too busy depicting how awful it was for poor Chris Kyle to shoot so many people (but how inspiring it is to witness!) without really admitting their existence as individual persons, each as important and human as any American man, woman, child, or soldier.
American Sniper fails to accomplish in 130 minutes what countless films have in 90. It’s competently made, occasionally exciting, and never exactly boring, but it’s totally devoid of anything that might render it legitimately worthwhile. The resolution is pathetic and utterly ignorant of the complex array of issues established throughout the film, and the brevity and nonchalant portrayal of the real-life story’s heavy conclusion was almost laughable.
The attempt to portray such a morally reprehensible man as a national hero is abhorrent in itself, but that Eastwood couldn’t even tell an interesting lie of a story almost adds insult to injury. The film might as well have been called Call of Duty: The Movie because while less amusing than the video game, it certainly succeeded in capturing the series’ notorious adherence to cliché, repetition, and total disregard for moral and historical truth.
