American Sniper is a Film About War that Says Nothing About War

Rating: 5/10 (26 January 2015)

American Sniper might not be a bad film, but I would absolutely not call it a good one. This film suffered from a lack of identity. I have no problem with a pro-war film or an anti-war film, even an ambiguous film, but this film didn't pull particularly in any direction. There are scenes setting up the theme of post traumatic stress disorder, there are scenes which function as action sequences, there are scenes meant to build characters, but nothing ever comes out of any of them. This film should've decided whether it wanted to be "The Hurt Locker" or "Black Hawk Down", instead of being inferior to both as a result of trying to be both. Scenes at home display our main character easily snapping to violence and making his family afraid, but scenes at war feature pounding Hollywood music and slow motion effects to show a bullet fly into the head of an enemy sniper. It all feels disingenuous.
On top of the tonal confusion, this film features glaring inaccuracies to the actual story of Chris Kyle, which I would be fine with if they served to make the film more interesting, but they actually do the exact opposite. The film features an enemy sniper who Chris does battle with named Mustafa (although Chris never actually encountered Mustafa in real life), who is set up to be the exact same person as Chris himself, only fighting for the opposite side. This could've set up an interesting theme of Chris confronting whether his actions are truly right, and whether he is so different from the men on the other end of his gun, but this fictional Mustafa only exists as a bad guy for Chris to fight. Another far worse example is "The Butcher", a completely fictional Iraqi warlord who tortures children with a power drill in front of their families and is an implied cannibal with a freezer full of human meat. No real human being acts this way. This character is straight out of Dexter. The film also glosses over many of Chris Kyle's uglier qualities in order to paint him as a nobler man than he really was. The themes it presents about war's ugliness and its effects on the human mind would've been much stronger if the film wasn't so beholden to Kyle.
The film presents the main character calling Muslims "savages" and "bad guys" free of any commentary (incidentally, it is well documented that the real Chris Kyle said much worse things about Muslims). Moral grays and actual dilemmas are far away from this film's mindset. Chris Kyle himself says that he regrets not a single one of his 160 kills to a psychologist, and the film neither agrees nor disagrees. Leaving a question deliberately unanswered is fine, but the film still must ask it. The editing does its job, but the film is in such a hurry to get to the next scene (whatever it may be) that it skips over any real examination or development of the themes it presents. The ending in particular, which I will leave unspoiled, is a giant slap in the face. The film also paradoxically doesn't function well as an action movie because its action scenes aren't particularly creative, exciting, or frequent.
There are no other characters to speak of except for Kyle. His wife is left to portray whatever female stereotype is appropriate at the time. His son is completely ignored by the film, but not in a way that seems deliberate or says anything about the main character. There is only one non- villain Iraqi character who gets merely 10 lines of dialogue before he is killed by "The Butcher".
The film is also shockingly cheap-looking. Digital blood squibs are not, and have never been convincing. The aforementioned slow motion sequence was clearly not shot with slow motion cameras, and so it looks like a skipping DVD. The CGI bullet which has no physical presence also gives me the impression that the scene fell flat in the editing bay and so slow motion was added. The wife's pregnant belly looks incredibly fake, and of course there is the now-infamous fake baby scene, which is hilarious because it would not have been even remotely hard to find a real baby and get it to be quiet for a scene that lasts one minute. Clint Eastwood has been directing films for 30 years. He should know better.
American Sniper features an incredible performance by Bradley Cooper and several great scenes, (the opening scene and several scenes at home, for example) but the movie collapses as soon as one thinks about it. Leaving questions unanswered makes many films come alive with additional thought, but it makes this one worse. Its ambition and performance still, in my mind, make it worth watching, despite its flaws.
(P.S. To any who take this review as a condemnation of the military, I have nothing but respect for those who fight and die for their country. Criticizing the film does not equate to criticizing the men and women who give their lives so that we may live safely, and pointing out the inaccuracies in the film is not the same thing as disrespecting its subject. I believe that demanding a more accurate film actually does the opposite, and I find it much more disrespectful that Clint Eastwood didn't think Chris Kyle was brave enough on his own and felt that what the film really needed was a villain for him to fight. That trivializes the actions of real soldiers far more than a negative review of a patriotic film.)