American Sniper (2015) Review

By Brandon Fu
Rated: R
Directed by: Clint Eastwood

American Sniper tells the real life story of Chris Kyle(Bradley Cooper), a US Navy SEAL Sniper who took four tours of Iraq during the Iraq War. He is credited with the most confirmed kills of any other officer, with an astounding 160. Although this movie is oscar-nominated, it does not live up to the hype and greatness of the other nominated films.

Clint Eastwood has been in kind of a dry spell lately. He has directed incredible films like Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby, but his last couple of movies were piss pour. Jersey Boys was a letdown, and the oscar-hungry movie J. Edgar was just bait for the Academy to nominate Leo Decaprio. Thankfully, the dry spell is over, but with a semi-decent movie that doesn't explore as many themes as it could have.

Bradley Cooper turns in the best performance of his career. It is definitely his most difficult role, as he augments his voice to a deep Texan accent. But, his role in this movie is the only one that we really care about. This is detrimental due to the cast of characters that were are introduced to that have NO backstory, and therefore watching them doesn't really bring any emotion. This includes Sienna Miller as Taya Kyle.

As for the rest of the movie, there is so much more room for improvement. The movie sets up this idea of PTSD and insecurity, but is not explored AT ALL. At a certain point it is just a movie about a person going from tour to tour.

Now, there is a lot of flame about the movie saying that it falsely represents Chris Kyle as a human being. But, what I'm saying is that the movie is not bad for portraying Chris Kyle wrong, but rather I am frustrated with this movie because it could have been so much better. And for that reason, the rating American Sniper gets is:

3/5