American Sniper opens with Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) perched atop a roof in the Middle East, weapon trained on a woman and child as he must make the difficult call on whether or not they are threats to the American soldiers in the area. If he’s wrong in his decision, innocent people will die.
Before we see him make the call, the film flashes back to Kyle’s life before enlisting – first him as a child hunting with his father (and receiving fatherly advice on how a man should live); then his pre-military life as a rodeo rider and finally his days in basic training, where he meets his future wife Taya (Sienna Miller).
This is a fairly standard movie tactic. You start the audience out with an engrossing, action-packed opening scene, then flashback to the events leading up to it to raise the stakes and flesh out the characters involved.
The problem is that director Clint Eastwood and writer Jason Hall seem uninterested in Kyle’s life outside of the warzone. Cooper does an excellent job portraying Kyle and the depiction of his four tours in the Middle East are all incredibly exciting and harrowing. But the film flounders whenever it leaves the battlefield.
The scenes of Kyle as a child offer some insight into his passion for hunting and his strong moral code, but it’s a surface examination of those things at best. And the scenes of Kyle’s rodeo days before enlisting fail to really explain why he became passionate about joining the military in his early 30s. (In the film, his girlfriend cheats on him, then he sees footage of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and suddenly he is enlisted. I have to imagine the actual decision was slightly more nuanced than that.)
Worst of all, the film really struggles to present Kyle’s courtship and marriage to Taya in an authentic or original way. They meet-cute in a bar with a cliched exchange about how she’s never marry a soldier because they are all meathead jerks. Then he wins her over with his charm (naturally) and we are treated to a lazy screenwriter favorite trope – Chris winning Taya a giant teddy bear at a carnival – before eventually just cutting to their wedding, which is of conveniently interrupted by the news that Kyle will be shipping out for his first tour.
Maybe the two really did meet the way the film portrays it, but it all feels like tired Hollywood tropes. The film gives us nothing that makes their love feel unique or Taya feel like anything more than a one-dimensional prop.
It’s a shame Eastwood and Hall can’t get Kyle’s life outside of the service on track because it would add so much more weight to the war scenes. Kyle becomes a hero with an impressive number of confirmed kills under his belt. He becomes a legend to the other soldiers. He’s steadfast in his belief that what he’s doing is right and important and he’s fearless in the battlefield.
But he has a wife and two kids at home. His wife feels alone and constantly worries about his safety. And even when he is home in-between tours, he’s distant and has trouble adjusting to normal life.
I would love to know more about Kyle’s home life and the struggles his family went through as he was off to war, but the film simply seems unwilling or unable to invest enough time and energy into making those moments compelling. At one point, Taya tells Chris that she feels like she’s making memories alone. The filmmakers, like Chris, can’t seem to get invested in making those memories with her.
The film’s ending is a bit jarring. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kyle’s real life, I won’t give away what happens, but Eastwood makes a very bizarre decision to reveal a rather unexpected twist to Kyle’s story in a title card moments before the credits start rolling. I was baffled by the choice and wished the film had elaborated further, instead of simply dropping this surprising bit of information as an afterthought. It was a very unsettling and odd way to close out the film.
But the film does depict the war scenes very well. Kyle’s exploits play as an action film where he’s in pursuit of The Butcher (Mido Hamada) and his men, but the film is careful to give weight to the action scenes to remind you that these are real people involved. The violence in the film is unsettling, which is appropriate given the subject matter. It’s not a pro-war or an anti-war film. It shows you the difficult split-second decisions Kyle and other SEALs have to make and the devastating toll those decisions take on them, both physically and mentally.
Cooper is great as Kyle. It’s perhaps the best performance of his career. And, for the most part, it’s an intriguing biopic about an accomplished soldier deserving of accolades. But the film’s inability to flesh out any characters beyond Kyle and its struggle to compellingly and authentically depict life outside of a warzone keeps it from being truly memorable.
Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.