Failure of a Bio-pic

Rating: 2/10 (16 January 2016)

I thought this movie was pretty terrible. Not quite I wish I could purge the memory from my soul terrible but definitely I wish I could get that time back terrible. I know many people are criticizing the film for it's political stance but I think that's a bit unfair just on principle. The problems with this movie go beyond that however. The scene where Kyle's credo of Sheep/Sheepdog/Wolf is introduced was just poorly done as a scene and it didn't flow naturally with the movie on top of that. It was like they finished filming the movie and realized this line that he's strongly associated with was missing and hired a couple of random people off the street to improvise a scene using the line then spliced whatever they came up with into the movie at a completely random point. The scene of young Kyle hunting with his dad was not quite as poorly handled but felt similarly superfluous. The real problem with the movie which can't be tied to any specific moment however was it's failure to really humanize Kyle. I'm not a cold person by any means and I simply felt nothing at the end of the movie when it's hero met his tragic end. It was like hearing a death statistic, I just acknowledged the fact there was one less person on the planet without really any empathy for those lives who were effected by that event. Filming and Acting were decent for the most part but nothing to make up this movies shortcomings.