Movie Review - American Sniper

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2014 – Spoiler alerts Clint Eastwood has made great movies as a director, but this one is truly awful. It is a heavily revisionist retelling of a ‘true story’, that of Chris Kyle, a navy SEAL serving over four tours as a sniper in Iraq. Kyle clocked up more kills than any other sniper in US history. The story follows him, (played well by Bradley Cooper) through basic training and over each tour, as well as capturing his relationship with his patiently waiting wife back home. The problem is that Kyle is presented as a mix of Wyatt Earp and Rambo, a living legend out for personal revenge on a barely seen, never speaking black leather clad Iraqi sniper who has successfully killed his best buddy. Kyle has simplistic near Biblical fixation on A Eye For An Eye being the best way forward. His fellow troops envy him as a legend, and he is dismissive of them for making the wrong moves when they die while he stays lucky. In reality, though Kyle hoped to take on Iraq's best sniper, Mustafa, he never met him or fought him. Mustafa was killed by other snipers. Kyle frequently disobeys orders. He leaves his rooftop perch to assist Marines (who he dismisses as inferior to SEALS) in a door to door search, and discovers where the guns are hidden before they do. This would have led to him being court martialled. One scene that looks particularly absurd, though it really happened involves Kyle talking to his heavily pregnant wife by cell-phone even while in the middle of an intense shoot-out. Apparently it is not unknown for soldiers and SEALS to illegally take phones on the field of engagement with them for personal use. The legality of the phone use is never challenged in the movie. In the closing twenty minutes the movie attempts to redeem itself by showing Kyle struggling to acclimatise back into civilian life. After coming close to killing a pet dog for biting his son at a family BBQ he is sent to a psychiatrist who gets him helping work with handicapped former service-men, a job he grows to love, along with guns, as we see him taking his son out hunting deer. A closing caption tells us that in 2013 Kyle was murdered along with another man, by a former soldier he was working with and the closing credits show the huge funeral procession for the real Chris Kyle. The film fails for being so focussed on Kyle that we barely get to know or care about the other men serving with him, while Sienna Miller gets to do little but be the dutiful wife waiting and worrying, while offering food and love on his periods of leave. One ineptly filmed peace-time leave scene involving Kyle and his wife handling their baby so obviously uses a child’s doll presented as the infant that it has a habit of making whole audiences explode in laughter. It is regarded as one of the most inept scenes in movie history, and I add it here on the Youtube. The film is overtly patriotic propaganda, reducing the Iraqi people to untrustworthy monsters, and associating Iraq with Osama Bin Laden & 9/11 – a claim loudly refuted by the facts. The film makes no reference to the bogus claims that America had evidence of Saddam owning weapons of mass destruction. We never get to know any of the enemy – they are just targets, even the principle villain, The real Kyle regarded all Muslims as savages. The real Kyle also had a reputation for falsely boasting about his killing prowess, even claiming to have killed looters in New Orleans after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, and personally killing two car-jackers who tried to snatch him – both stories were totally discredited. If true, they would make him more seriel killer than soldier anyway. Arthur Chappell