Pro-Americanism plunders a passable film. Distasteful.

Rating: 3/10 (6 January 2015)

Alas, I think that sad day has finally arrived. I think it may be time to wheel Clint Eastwood off to the home for the aged and once-great Hollywood royalty. His (intermittent) acting ability finally gave up the ghost with Trouble With the Curve and now, with American Sniper, his directorial prowess has gone south, too. The king is dead, long live the king.
I suffered his latest offering and death knell with my viewing companion, Bag. He approached it with enthusiasm having loved Chris Kyle's autobiography of the same name; I approached it with trepidation having given up half a chapter in after suffering an emotional allergic reaction to the jingoistic, gung-ho, Team America (you know, "America! F*** Yeah!") attitude.
We both hated the film.
American Sniper is the story of America's 'greatest' sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), a Navy SEAL who put bullets through the heads and bodies of over 160 men, women and children; a man we are supposed to celebrate as a bona fide hero; a man that we are supposed to believe is a good man worthy of our eternal adoration because, according to Eastwood, he opted not to kill one particular child and carried a (stolen) bible (that he didn't read). How odd, then, that a point is made about a Moslem sniper carrying a Quran as well as a rifle and therefore being evil.
The film as a whole is a painful experience. Eastwood veers away from anything that could possibly be construed as 'un-American', painting Kyle and his companions only as hard working, loyal heroes to whom we owe our hearts and minds. No thought is given to it being an illegal war, that what occurred accounted to little more than an invasion, that the majority of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the war were peace-loving civilians and not terrorist aiming to destroy America.
And yet when, in the final scene, Eastwood has the opportunity to depict honestly the psychological damage war does to humans, even those apparent 'saviours' of the world, he shies away from it, preferring to cut and leave us to work it out. Why the apparent aim at subtlety now when he has hammered home his aggressive point all the way along? Heck, even in the credits there is no let up as we are bombarded with news footage of the 'hero's' funeral procession and the deafening silence so that we, too, can show our awe and respect to a man who chose to take a job with the sole aim of being paid to kill.
But forget the politics. American Sniper still stinks. According to Bag, who has read the book more times than I have fingers, screenwriter Jason Hall has shown little evidence of having actually read it fully himself, such are the liberties he has taken with the content, characters and 'facts'. I thought it was just me, but as we emerged into peaceful daylight, my companion muttered "I know that book inside out and I still couldn't follow which character was which."
Eastwood's hearing is presumably shot, too, as for much of the time it was impossible to discern what many of the actors, Cooper particularly, were saying. Maybe he gave a solid performance, perhaps the Kyle family will be over the moon with his portrayal of the sniper, but it doesn't count for much when most of the audience (in our screening room anyway) are leaning to their neighbours and asking "What did he say?" I suppose their comments added variety to exasperated sighs, raised eyebrows and longing stares at the ceiling.
Sienna Miller makes a valiant attempt to bring something of quality to American Sniper as Kyle's wife, Taya, but she is lost in this noisy, bulldozing mess. What happened to the Clint Eastwood who delicately crafted the sharp brutality and the violent nuances of Unforgiven, Letters from Iwo Jima and Bird? There is little evidence of his skill here.
It was a long drive home as Bag fumed. Judging from the sounds many other cinema-goers, they, too, were relieved to see the back of American Sniper.
For my part, to end on a positive note, it didn't make me quite as angry as 2012's Act of Valor but I still needed something frivolous with which to clean my mind out.
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