Oscars 2015 Review- American Sniper

This week was meant to be Whiplash but it doesn't appear to be on anyway right now and my cinema of choice is currently under new management. What this all means is that I'm out of my comfort zone with both the cinema and film. I had no desire to see American Sniper until Whiplash fell out of the running and this was the only other accompaniment to Kingsman: The Secret Service (review of that in a few weeks). So, knuckle down for... Well, Bradley Cooper shooting dudes in the face for an hour or two.

American Sniper is the film based on a book based on a true story about the most successful sniper in American military history. It's directed by Clint Eastwood, stars beefy hunk Bradley Cooper and has been five time nominated at this year's Oscars. Does it deserve all those nominations? No. It doesn't. The film is two hours long for a start but it feels like a film twice that length. I've nothing against films that are dark or films that are long but please don't try to be both. It just bores your audience. But that is not the only flaw with this movie, oh no. There are plenty more and we're going to get into every little bit of that. But first, let's start with some positives.

The actors in this film all did a great job. Sure, it sounds generic but it's a genuinely important point. Plus, I feel I need to say something positive before the rest of this review. Bradley Cooper clearly put a lot of work into beefing up for this film and it shows. He also gives his acting all and while his performance isn't quite as captivating as it was in Silver Linings: Playbook, he acts to a very high standard. His portrayal attempts at subtlety when the script doesn't and these moments are some of the best. Were this not already such a strong year for leading actors, I'd say he stood a chance for the award but Michael Keaton and Eddie Redmayne have muscled most of the competition away. They're not scared by some poxy sniper fellow. Sienna Miller is also in this film. She plays an attractive woman. She does this well. Alright, can I get to the negatives yet? Please? Thank you.

So, the tone of this film is pretty much everywhere. It spends the entire two hours deciding what it wants to be: a war film full of bros, a po-faced look into the murks of the human psyche or a biopic. What it ends up being is a murky and uncomfortable mix of all three without ever being any of them. Some of the scenes are full of bad old Iraqi's being shot in the face and the phrase "Mark's dead, bro". No sentence should ever feature conformation of someone's death and the phrase bro unless it's a comedy. This isn't. There are scenes where Chris has to weigh up whether to shot children and women and he looks in pain. It tears him up inside and this is all well and good but then our protagonist is a hero again and a bro and all is good. And then we have all the multiple discrepancies with real life and ultra dramatised moments that prevent the film from being a biopic. This is a murky film and not just because of the permanent filter on the lens that makes the film look like a AAA game from 2007.

But now we're at the kicker. In this film, Chris Kyle (the titular sniper) is portrayed as an American hero. What becomes clear over the course of the film is that he isn't. While this is always a neat trick when films pull it off, I don't think this was deliberate. All the people he kills are holding guns or shooting at him or his buddy's and while that justifies it, it doesn't make him a god. For me, the most alarming and powerful scene of the whole film was the credits when we see a montage of clips from Kyle's funeral. His coffin has a procession that goes through a lot of Texas and on every roadside, people are on the side of the road cheering. Not for the fact he's dead or something morbid like that. No, these people consider Kyle to be a genuine hero and that's terrifying. Sure, he's the sniper to have killed more enemies in the field than any other and he has the longest shot ever succesfully pulled off by a sniper but this is all glorified. They act like it makes him a legend, someone to go down in history, someone to look up  to. NO! He isn't! He was a killer! He may have killed to protect his men but he doesn't deserve to have this title. And going back to that long distance sniper shot, that particular scene is laughable. It looks like a moment out of the video game series Sniper Elite. In said game, players are rewarded for their good shots with follow shots of the bullet right into their enemy. That is a silly idea from a silly game and in that context, it works. But in a serious war film, it couldn't feel more out of place.

Oh, and one more thing. This may be the most middle american film in the world. More so than Boyhood. In fact, this film makes me want to go back and retroactively praise Boyhood for it's restraint on that front. The hero of this film is white. He lives in Texas with his beautifully white wife and two white kids. He fights alongside a bunch of white dudes on one black dude who we see maybe twice in the whole thing. And he shoots the bad guys. How do we know they're the bad guys? Why, that would be because they're wearing turbans and are black. It's not even a scenario where they're painted as people "just trying to do the right thing". In this scenario, they are pure bad, the Americans are pure good. The Iraqi's might as well be child molesting Nazis who are inbred, they can't get more evil. And that's just all swell, is it? Can we really support and praise a film in which characters are two dimesional and the line between good and evil is so thick it might as well be a star of it's own reality TV show on MTV.

So should you watch American Sniper? Unless you're watching it illegally, no. This is a film that's not worth supporting. The only reason I don't regret the ticket is that it still technically helps support the movie industry as a whole. It's a large amount of American propoganda, interspersed with people being bros, the horrors of war and Chris Kyle not really caring about family. My advice to you is to treat this film the way Chris Kyle treats his family: ignore it. That's why I give it a