American Sniper

2014 fictional biopic / propaganda piece

Rating: 10/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: An American snipes, heroically.

Heroes have flaws, but you wouldn't know it from this movie because this is America. In America, flaws just get in the way of good storytelling and the promotion of big American ideals. Clint Eastwood might as well have just made a G.I. Joe cartoon because it would be about as accurate and still push forward the agenda he's pushing. Actually, the product placement in this movie is just as blatant as the frequent mention of Twinkies or scenes taking place in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond in Click. The "product" in this case is ideology instead of something you can purchase and consume or wash yourself off with or sleep on.

Chris Kyle, in that big Texan drawl that required me to turn on the subtitles, talks all about how this is the "greatest country on Earth" and how he "felt [he] was made for something more," the kind of stuff that without a doubt will have guys wearing their American flag t-shirts singing their rah-rah-rahs. Early in the Kyle story, we get a speech from his father about sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, and that pretty much gives us all the information we need to know. You can probably understand everything you're supposed to understand about this Hollywood version of this very real Navy SEAL and then turn off the movie and tell people that you've seen it. Did the real Chris Kyle get some remarkable killin' done and save a bunch of Marines' lives? I have no doubts that he did that, and unless you're the most pacifistiest of pacifist liberals, the guy's a hero. A real American hero. But this almost embarrassing tribute to him, based on his own writings, feels more like the type of celebration we'd have for an athlete or a guy who's really good at video games. I'm a little surprised we didn't have statistics on "headshots" or something. His nickname becomes "The Legend," and after a while in this redundant and bloated look at his heroism, he starts to feel more like folklore and less like a flesh-and-blood human being. He's Babe Ruth. Or maybe he's Paul Bunyan, swinging a sniper rifle instead of an ax.

Here's what I wonder, and I hope this doesn't put me on some sort of blacklist or something. I mean, I hope I can still fly after saying something like this. Chris Kyle has a nemesis in this movie, a former Olympian named Mustafa. Isn't Mustafa, an equally skilled killer, the exact same type of hero as Kyle? Of course, he's protecting a guy who uses drills on people's skulls, but is that much different than rooting for a guy who loved killing Iraqis, actual human beings he "couldn't give a flying fuck about." Here, read this:

http://www.theweek.co.uk/62133/chris-kyle-five-things-american-sniper-gets-wrong

It makes our hero look a little less legendary and a little more like all the rest of us pathetic human beings, doesn't it? And if this were just a movie about a fictional sniper, I'm not sure I'd have the same problems with it. Yes, it would still be propaganda, but it would come with a warning label. Here, people just eat this up as the honest-to-God truth, and, maybe making it worse, I think Clint Eastwood knew that going in.

I can forgive everybody involved for two reasons. The first is the use of the word "gnarly" in there somewhere, of course used by a Marine to describe how our hero was able to snipe somebody. The second is this scene right here:

You don't see it here, but they also gave the baby a CGI hand. It was so fake looking that I couldn't stop laughing. It might be my favorite thing from any 2014 film.

The rest of the movie isn't funny at all though.