Clint Eastwood's courageous film, AMER!CAN SNIPER . . .

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2015)

. . . clearly is the best English language movie of 2014, as well as topping JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN as the most moving anti-war flick of all time. One of the first things title character Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) points out to his eventual wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), is that he's a proud Texan, NOT a Redneck. "We ride horses, they ride cousins," is how he puts it. Before notching a record 160-plus one-by-one death shots in Iraq, Eastwood is careful to show that Chief Kyle follows in the steps of such famous American serial killers as Alvin York (initiated on turkeys) and Jeffrey Dahmer (who began with dogs) when young lad Chris guns down an unarmed deer under the supervision of his dad. Nicknamed "Legend" (apparently his fellow S.E.A.L.s were big Will Smith fans), Chris feels doomed by this phrase--"When does glory fade away, and become a losing Crusade?"--written in a letter home by one of the many "spotters" he loses to an enemy sniper (as this is another true-life sniper vs. sniper tale, similar to the WWII story, ENEMY AT THE GATES). That serves as Chris' comrade's own eulogy a couple weeks later. Director Eastwood bravely exposes the Olympic movement as a terrorist training ground with a Syrian gold medalist in sharp-shooting gunning down hundreds of America's finest every time Chris is on the satellite phone with his spouse, or having a conjugal visit with Taya back in Texas. Eastwood's tacit conclusion is that America has to avoid having traitors such as W. and his cronies corrupting our Youth with phony baloney military excursions. Unlike a 90% "good war" such as WWII, the fallout from a 99% "bad war" like Iraq curses everything it touches, as Chris Kyle and his family learn in AMER1CAN SNIPER.