Cinematically, not a good film. Intellectually, Pap.

Rating: 2/10 (30 January 2015)

I was very keen to watch a great movie of foreboding power, a good brainless death suspense action movie...
Result: No mystery, no suspense, no realism, no symbolic philosophy, no intrigues of analogy. The scenes are artistically bland, the acting is boring, it's b-movie kind of dialogue. The length of the scenes don't use your attention span so for long enough to absorb one atmosphere or another, or catch your attention, cinematically.
The trailer was awesome. The first 5 minutes were great, and then it kind of dozed off. I prefer to watch an episode of the A-team or mcguyver for storytelling ability or a kind of sense of style.
Chris Kyle was boring, his childhood was uneventful and fantasy-like, unrealistic propaganda to show him of unshakable virtue... a true hero! His gravitas was pretty tame. When he stood up from an 8 hours intense sniper session, he looked like he was getting up from a 5 minutes arcade game... "oh i got 6 or 8 of them".
Then comes the subject of the philosophy of the film. It's got some interesting attempts at culture comparison at the start, contrasting rubble and religious fervor, to books and American family life. Then it swoops into an endless twitching drivel - moron mode, starting with some stupid SEAL training scenes with sarge shouting and a black man hosing himself down with mud with a big hose, crawling through a puddle and laughing with some Kevlar on his chest. Some cheap soundbites and empty racial interactions.. then it tries to convince you that the only point of view in this story is that of American Soldiers, and that Iraq is just some kind of random place with brown people who are being naughty and vicious in the face of the valiant Yankee Doodles, who are valiantly invading the place with tanks and lines of men and kicking in doors to make it secure from the bad locals. Obviously, by that time, Cheney had ordered that all the prisons be opened up, all the police and army to be laid off, general blanket bombing, followed by thuggish military discipline, kicking pedestrians around the street... and the film picks up somewhere in that timeline, we don't know where. So i call it Cheney's Sniper, because it doesn't have a clear timeline or sense of chronology or logic, it's fuzzy and void, film, ... And it wasn't exciting!! boo!
if you want to watch rodeo, cowboy hats, a kid and his dad shooting a dear, sarge shouting at his corporals, brown people being shot, jolly American marines being brave and manly, no guts, some tanks, and a clichÃ© love story, go watch it!