Critics reviews

Eastwood is too introspective, too multilayered, and too knowing about the backfire from on-screen violence to print the legend of the man Kyle's awed comrades called "the Legend." The Chris Kyle of American Sniper, the memoir, is not the Chris Kyle of American Sniper, the movie, which makes for a more interesting—and ultimately more celebratory—portrait of a man who, by his own account, reveled in his work as a flesh-and-blood Predator drone.

The film's depiction of Iraqis as devious, homicidal or both doesn't exactly scream sensitivity, and when the Army vows to "put the fear of God into these savages" the film takes that at face value. Yet this is an immensely potent drama – and, despite appearances, not an irresponsible one.

American Sniper is a sleeper, which is to say no one in the movie industry expected it to perform so well at the box office. No less surprising, perhaps, is the film's skill and conviction—the adroit shifts in time and space, epitomized by an early time-expanding flashback, or the moments of unexpected beauty, as in a sandstorm-shrouded firefight between Kyle's unit and a group of Iraqi insurgents that occurs late in the film.

To whatever extent Eastwood's movie dramatizes the horrible effect of war on the soldier's psyche and depicts its fictionalized Kyle as a compromised protagonist, it nevertheless indulges its impulse to satisfy. This, coupled with an epilogue that tracks Kyle through his rehabilitation as a veteran and culminates in his hero's funeral, does much to undermine the psychological sophistication Eastwood, Hall, and a never-better Cooper bring to the material.

[From the film's point of view,] the Iraqis are all "savages" who threaten American lives and need to be killed. There's some truth in this representation, insofar as this is how a lot of American soldiers thought. Yet the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the "war on terror.

American Sniper cannot be reduced to simple pro- or anti-war labels... those who insist that the film is (only) selling a pro-military bill of goods are missing the subtlety of Bradley Cooper's acting in the lead role. Without condescension (to either political extreme), he plays Chris Kyle as a man in thrall to jingoistic fantasies: as the movie goes along, his vision gradually shrinks to the size of a rifle scope.

Kyle is a seething hulk with a thousand-yard stare who is clearly keeping his wartime agonies to himself. To do anything less would be a betrayal. This is a powerful one-note performance, so committedly opaque that you keep leaning forward, waiting for the steroidal armour to crack... [The finale] seems antithetical to the rest of the film. From studious nuance to distorted nationalism — it leaves a very bad taste.

By attempting to simplify one of the most complex of human follies, American Sniper ultimately becomes a quicksand of contradictions. Chris Kyle is depicted as a human being virtually without uncertainty, someone whose code of honor allows him to act with an icy clarity that inevitably saved countless Coalition lives. But it also results in a film that is jarringly anti-psychological.

Eastwood, Cooper, and screenwriter Jason Hall deliver everything this tale requires, without quite squelching the ambient pathology surrounding it. Any project begun with an avowed commitment to honor a slain war hero will round off some rough edges. Any such film directed by Clint Eastwood risks becoming a Fallujah-set version of Shane.

Star Bradley Cooper does some of his best acting ever here. Bulked up to make himself resemble, with respect to body shape, a large-scale nine-volt battery, Cooper suppresses the actorly knowingness he's brought to most of his prior screen roles and gives his character here a simultaneous credulousness and edge.

American Sniper is a movie of violent action—but its action is surrounded by a terrible stillness. Its story of war contains valor and horror—the destructive and self-destructive conflicts that are intrinsic to a person endowed with a warrior's noble nature. As such, it's a cinematic tragedy in the deepest and most classical sense of the term. Eastwood considers recent events with a fierce anger even as he considers the universal span of human experiences with an Olympian ruefulness.

American Sniper ends in sorrow with a procession of its own – actual footage of Kyle's funeral parade play over the credits. Here, Eastwood makes an admission of his own; Kyle, as with any historical subject, will remain an enigma, and the proceeding film has simply grappled with one particular (and not altogether flattering) version of the man.