Clint Eastwood has done better

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2015)

I will start off by saying that the movie was not bad, but it was far from Eastwood's best. Bradley Cooper was probably the one standout part of the movie that was actually really good, his acting was excellent and it captured Chris Kyle quite well.
But... (and this part contains some minor spoilers) I felt the pacing of the movie was not quite right, it felt rushed, too much fast action, it didn't immerse you into the war zone, you didn't get a sense that this was real life or death, you didn't get the emotional toll the war was taking. I felt the editing really let the movie down, his tour's of duty came and went too quickly, the way his psychological state was deteriorating just didn't correlate to the ground action he was experiencing. The Hurt Locker did a much better job of capturing that raw emotion and intensity. The movie should have aimed to hit us more on an emotional level, we should have walked out of the cinema feeling that war is a terrible place, it should have made us sympathize with veterans coping with post traumatic stress. Instead I feel it pandered to patriotism at the expense of compelling story telling. Ultimately that makes me sad as it had real potential...