American Sniper
Rated: MA
Four out of five
Now Showing
“YOU’VE got a gift,” says the young Chris Kyle’s father after the boy shoots a deer at long range on a hunting trip. Indeed he does.
The boy grows up to be a navy SEAL sniper doing four tours of duty in Iraq.
With 160 confirmed kills (255 probable), something’s got to give, even if Kyle says he only thinks about the fellow soldiers he could have saved. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper begins and ends tragically, with America’s lore of the gun, but we’re long past the time when a .44 magnum could help make his day.
Working with a script by Jason Hall based on Kyle’s autobiography (written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice), Eastwood is in relentless control of the material — and our uneasiness.
The scenes in Iraq are gritty and tight but the tone of the film is elegiac.
As often as the camera looks down the barrel of a rifle, it peers back through the scope to show us the eyes of a man who knows he has to go home after pulling the trigger.
Bradley Cooper gives an astonishing performance as Chris Kyle, tough and detached on the job and then, back home with his wife (Sienna Miller) and children detached again, but for all the wrong reasons. He almost has the eyes of Robert De Niro’s Michael from The Deer Hunter.
It’s in that ‘almost’ that the power of his performance lies.
Back in Iraq, Kyle and his team occupy a rooftop to hunt a menacing Iraqi sniper.
Kyle sights him almost two kilometres away, but the shot will give away their position and draw Iraqi fighters.
“Bad air up here,” says the pilot of an Apache helicopter who launches a missile into the melee as an epic dust storm (the film’s one great metaphor) brings visibility to zero.
A decade on and things are still not much clearer on the ground.