Much of the same but still very classy

Rating: 7/10 (18 January 2015)

Jack Reacher once said "it's never the same with a sniper out there". I imagine that to be a very true statement. 'American Sniper' is the true story of Chris Kyle a Navy SEAL sniper who went on four tours of duty to Iraq and set records for the amount of people he killed during his career. Now, instantly you can imagine the amount of political debate that is going to take place over a film like this. Do you portray him as an out and out hero? Do you portray him as a hero, but also put a negative spin on his actions? Tough decisions for the filmmakers to make right out of the gate. Did they do a great job with them? I'm not entirely sure.
Bradley Cooper has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Lead role for this film. The Academy loves an actor who transforms oneself for a role and that's exactly what Cooper did putting on an enormous amount of weight. He also had to learn a Texan accent which I felt he absolutely nailed. The thing that's going to stop him winning is probably more the film than anything. It just never gave him that one scene to blow us away with. Still he was incredibly consistent throughout the film and being nominated three years in a row is no mean feat.
The film's biggest downfall is that the first four-fifths of it feel like we are just going through the same experience over and over. Not a lot is really being added to the story along the way. We understand what is going on and it just feels a bit like it's being rammed down our throats. Clint Eastwood has proved himself to be a fine director in the past. I noticed in the trivia section an interesting comment relating to Chris Kyle's real life father telling both Eastwood and Cooper (who also produced the film) that he would "unleash Hell" if his son's memory was disrespected in the film. I can't help but wonder whether that had any effect over certain scenes they might have liked to include along the way. There's no dodging the fact that people with certain political agendas are not going to like this film.
That being said it has been nominated for Best Picture and while it has next to no chance of actually taking home the award that's still an impressive accomplishment. It seems the Academy likes to put at least one war movie in the the category each year ever since the success of 'The Hurt Locker'. The movie has only been out a few days and already it seems to be stirring up a lot of debate, as was probably to be expected. I know I plan to go and read up about the real life events and do some fact checking against the movie to see what was included and what wasn't. All that aside though it's a pretty good watch for the most part.