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American Sniper
Patriotic can-do … American Sniper. Photograph: Keith Bernstein/AP
Patriotic can-do … American Sniper. Photograph: Keith Bernstein/AP

American Sniper review – worryingly dull celebration of a killer

This article is more than 9 years old
Clint Eastwood wastes Bradley Cooper in an unsubtle biopic of a famous US Navy Seal sharp-shooter

Why American Sniper is facing an uphill battle in Hollywood

Clean Harry could be an alternative title for Clint Eastwood’s bland, unsubtle and worryingly dull celebration of Chris Kyle, a real-life US Navy Seal and fearless sniper, renowned for 160 confirmed kills in Iraq. When an exasperated officer tells Kyle that one of the people in his crosshairs was no threat and reportedly carrying nothing more than a Qur’an, Kyle replies crisply that this object was “pressed metal, fired 7.62s and looked just like an AK-47” – a line weirdly reminiscent of Detective Callahan unrepentant about taking down that “naked man chasing a woman through a dark alley with a butcher’s knife and a hard-on”. But there’s none of Harry’s subversion or wit.

American Sniper - video review Guardian

Bradley Cooper is not particularly well cast or well directed in the role of Kyle; this actor’s natural charm and humour are suppressed, and Kyle’s personality is solemnly sketched in terms of straight-ahead patriotic can-do. The tough times he goes through in action, and the aggressive personality changes he experiences on the home front, are perfunctorily dramatised with glib cliches and seen purely in terms of a temporary disorder. Most damagingly of all, Eastwood fails to show the complex celebrity status Kyle attained in postwar civilian life with the publication of a bestselling autobiography – on which this film is largely based – and the effect that this celebrity had on those around him, and how it may have contributed to a certain dramatic event that Eastwood primly declines to show at all, presumably because it doesn’t fit the sentimental picture. What a disappointment.

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