Saw American Sniper on opening night-packed
house at the Pasadena Arc Light, and in this town, that's
saying something. As everyone knows by now, this movie
is about Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military
history. If you are reading this, then you already know
how it ends, with Kyle being murdered at a Texas gun range by
a man he was trying to help. So going into this movie,
you keep the ending in the back of your mind, but can't afford
to let it color your thoughts about the movie.
Thankfully, Clint Eastwood directs the movie at a steady (if
not surprisingly slow) pace. If you have seen any of the
recent spate of desert movies, there is a sense of familiarity
with any character in military garb fighting a war in the
Middle East. And I think this might be a problem-after
seeing torture, violence, etc. in "Lone Survivor", "Zero Dark
30" and other war movies, a sniper picking off targets seems
kind of tame. Pretty hard to ratchet up the tension when
you know the outcome.
Bradley Cooper is solid-this makes the second movie with him
starring (the other being "Silver Linings Playbook") where he
isn't Brad Cooper. Like Tom Hanks, Cooper has shown the
ability to inhabit the role, and he does this very
effectively. He has a drawl, looks scruffy most of the
time, and his features are at the same time soft and almost
doughy, which is probably a byproduct of playing a big
dude. His wife (played by Sienna Miller) is also
startlingly good, especially because she was raised in London
and has a British accent in real life, yet you wouldn't know
this after watching her. I think she is the emotional
anchor of this movie, and Kyle kind of orbits around her
relationship with him.
I know there is now some controversy swirling
around Kyle's exploits, but my view is he was doing his job to
protect his fellow service members from death. Political
view aside, his exploits made him a legend, and given a
choice, I don't think anyone would want the job he did so
well. Eastwood makes it clear that this was a man
conflicted by what he does for a living, yet resigned to doing
it well to save others.
It's a good bit of movie-making, but by no means the most
interesting topic out there. I think my problem with it
is that I have seen various forms of this movie elsewhere, and
even the emotional scenes where he clearly has demons seems
too familiar. So I will have to be really careful and
provide a composite score: it gets an 81 score for content,
but a 73 for emotional content. Overall, I think it
deserves a solid 77 points, which might appear low, but I
really want to see a movie that shows me something that I
haven't seen before, like Eastwood's "Gran Torino", or
"Million Dollar Baby." It may be unfair to lump this
movie in with the others, but you have to judge Eastwood's
movies against each other, and this topic is not exactly
new.
