A war with no winner

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2015)

Bradley Cooper, bearded and beefed-up, sheds his glamour-boy image and delivers his best performance to date as real-life US Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, his country's best-ever sniper. who in four tours of duty in Iraq took out over 150 enemy combatants. Both in Iraq, where his team-mates fall beside him, and at home, visiting hideously wounded and mentally scarred veterans, Kyle sees the full horror - and the true cost - of war. The movie's final moments, subtly mixing diminuendo with crescendo, powerfully underline the theme that the end of fighting is no longer the end of a war.
Men at war: territory that we've been visiting for decades. At 84 Clint Eastwood has lost none of his edge; his direction here is just as tight and edgy as Kathryn Bigelow or Ridley Scott.
Sienna Miller is very convincing as the party girl turned home-maker who frets that Chris's devotion to his country is making him neglect his wife and kids. The tension in their marriage is finely balanced against the tension on the rooftops of Baghdad and Fallujah. There's not a lot that's new in American SNIPER, but it's two-and-a-half hours that remind us that in wars there are ultimately no winners.