Clint Eastwood’s latest portrait of a man of violence unfolds with an immediacy that the octogenarian multi-hyphenate rarely musters anymore. In place of the solemn air that suffused every minute of the recent reflective likes of Gran Torino and J. Edgar, we’re immediately immersed in the perilous milieu that is an urban war zone.
On a rooftop in Fallujah, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)—a newly initiated Navy SEAL sniper—peers through his rifle’s sites at the rubble-littered, Marine-patrolled street below. When a potential threat presents itself in the form of two unlikely assailants, it likewise seems to represent one of those “impossible decisions” that typically gives a protagonist pause and instigates some no-holds-barred wrestling with doubts. However, Kyle barely hesitates, taking dead aim and firing two fatal shots that dispatch the danger with remarkable efficiency. And while these particular scalps may not be what he envisioned claiming when he signed on, they do set the standard for the years of decorated service that see the taciturn Texan amass another 158 confirmed kills over four tours of duty.
It’s an impressive body count that would earn the real-life Kyle the title of “most lethal sniper in U.S. military history” (or so reads the subtitle of the autobiography that inspired Jason Hall’s screenplay). Lacking The Hurt Locker’s journalistic impulses, American Sniper assumes the form of a firefight-punctuated character study that once again allows Eastwood to investigate the toll killing takes on a man. Consequently, the film dispenses with the distraction of A-listers serving as glorified extras and never lets Cooper out of its crosshairs. Apparently convinced that manic energy only gets one so far (i.e. onto the Oscar ballot but short of the podium), he plays Kyle as largely humorless crusader whose only flashes of charisma arise in an early scene in which he woos his eventual wife (Sienna Miller, subsequently charged with the thankless task of weeping and fretting, often over the phone).