American Sniper

American Sniper (15)

USA 2014  132 mins  Dir: Clint Eastwood  Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes, Max Charles

All you need to know is in the title. There are in fact two deadly snipers in Clint Eastwood’s return to the battlefield, but we learn very little about the other one apart from the fact that he’s a Syrian marksman who once competed at the Olympics. This one-dimensional bad guy might as well be wearing a black hat.

Eastwood’s flag-salutin’ I-rak war movie is pitched firmly at patriotic Middle American punters who want to see heroic soldiers from “the greatest country on earth” whupping ass in revenge for 9/11. Its lack of nuance and wider political context means it’s likely to play less well to audiences who don’t embrace the moral certainty of the USA’s self-appointed role as the world’s policeman.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Cooper) is renowned as the deadliest sniper in US military history. As the dastardly Iraqis send out women and small children loaded with with bombs, he has to make split-second distinctions between innocent civilians and evildoers armed to the teeth. But what makes this guy tick? Flashback time! Back in the Land of the Free, we find the young, god-fearing Kyle delighting his tough-as-old-boots Texan pa by demonstrating a flair for killing animals with his shotgun. Dad explains his view that the world consists of three types of people: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Naturally, he wants his son to become a noble sheepdog, “blessed with the gift of aggression,” who protects the weak. If you’re waiting for the film to adopt a more sophisticated outlook, you’ll be waiting in vain.

American Sniper then races through all the traditional war movie bullet points. Attacks on US embassies overseas prompt our patriotic hero to sign up. The shouty training montage swiftly follows, during which raw recruits are hosed down with cold water while kicking their legs in the air. (This seems an odd way to prepare for desert warfare, but what do I know?) Kyle meets a woman (Miller, in a thankless whinging spouse role) in a bar and subsequently marries her just before being shipped off to Iraq, with his Bible tucked into his pocket.

Eastwood certainly knows his way around a combat sequence, handling all the tense shootouts, ambushes and chases with considerable skill. But in reducing the Iraqis to “savages” and turning Kyle into some kind of idealised, flawless, humble all-American hero who merely suffers a smidgen of PTSD, he misses a more interesting story that can be found by anyone who peruses the sniper’s autobiography (in which he writes: “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”). Cooper gives it his best stoic shot, but Kyle’s post-Iraq experiences back home (a defamation lawsuit, all kinds of outlandish claims) might have made for a more interesting film. Eastwood also seems unsure how to address his subject’s unexpected demise and the potential questions arising from it, so he simply races through this towards the big funeral procession that invites us to stand up and salute his cardboard hero – at gunpoint if necessary.