American Garbage

Rating: 1/10 (19 January 2015)

"American Sniper" is one of the worst movies I have ever been forced to endure. It is simplistic propaganda masquerading as an award-worthy story. There is no story.
American kid Chris Kyle is good at shooting so he uses 9/11 as an excuse to join the Navy SEALS and kill Iraqis. That's it. That's the whole movie. Clint Eastwood's one-dimensional direction shows Chris as some sort of American hero, even though any sane human will at least question the cold-blooded murder of men, women & children in a morally ambiguous war. I'm still not sure how Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
Clint tries to humanize our hero by tacking on a subplot about Chris's wife, but this storyline- like the rest of the movie- has NO conflict. Chris meets his prospective wife at a bar, dates her, marries her, impregnates her and starts a family with no trouble whatsoever. Why are we watching this? In the meantime our hero goes back to Iraq to blow the brains out of more women and children, and he doesn't seem to lose any sleep over his work.
Back home Chris gets accosted in a Jiffy-Lube by a fellow veteran, and the sequence plays more like a romantic meeting than a heartfelt tribute, as the appreciative vet stares at Chris with moist, dewy eyes while licking his lips. Either way, Kyle is unmoved and displays no emotion. Why are we watching this again?
Sienna Miller as Chris' wife cannot stop touching her belly to remind us that she's preggers. The straps of her fake pregnant belly are visible beneath her bra straps. At one point she hands Chris their child and it is very obviously a lifeless, motionless doll. Why are we watching this?
If you're looking for any type of character development you won't find it here: Chris Kyle is portrayed as a killing machine without any discernible personality. A fellow officer raises the question of why Chris carries a Bible. "I've never seen you open it," he says, and the issue is dropped there. Does Chris believe in God? Does he not? There is no internal life whatsoever.
Bradley Cooper does his best to instill this cardboard cutout of a character with some depth, but all he manages to do is say "Um" in a Southern drawl before he speaks every line to remind us that he is indeed from Texas. He meets his brother at an airport and the scene is a crime against acting: there is no connection, no exchange, no conflict. Suddenly Chris decides he wants to come home from the war and stop killing people. He does. Then he is killed by a fellow soldier and Eastwood leaves us with TV footage of the real Chris Kyle's funeral: six SUV's driving down the road while a couple people hold signs. Why?
Why was this movie made? What is it supposed to say? Why is this man special, or significant, or evil, or great? Why are we supposed to care about any of this? Why are we watching this?
The good news is: you don't have to.
GRADE: D-