Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’ is Action Packed

If you’re gunning for flag-waving, gung-ho Hollywood action, “American Sniper” hits the bull’s eye with a kill shot to the brain. But if truth is the first casualty of war, Clint Eastwood’s Iraq War neo-Western just might be the last dying word on how history is written by the winners—or at least those armed with $100 million opening weekends.

Brutal, incendiary, ruthlessly simplistic, and bluntly manipulative, “Sniper” is John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” reloaded for the shock-and-awe generation. Eastwood, writer Jason Hall and star Bradley Cooper not only wrap themselves in the flag, but they make sure to cover up their eyes as well. Released on the weekend commemorating the pacifist American martyr Martin Luther King, here’s a movie aimed squarely to celebrate (and eulogize) the kick-ass power of the American soldier-warrior, right or wrong.

From the best-selling 2012 autobiography by Chris Kyle, Eastwood, Cooper, and company join forces for blistering two-hour tour of duty that takes no prisoners and brooks no dissent. However, there is collateral damage, and “Sniper” has understandably set off a fusillade of unfriendly fire on critical home front. Audiences patrolling for nuance and a wider scope of war and its consequences will be well advised to dodge this blustery, cold-blooded draft drifting in from the direction of Fox News.

Politically if not cinematically, Eastwood’s own direction amounts to the sequel to his bizarre, chair-talking performance at the 2012 Republican National Convention. He sets his low-caliber sights from the get-go, introducing us to Kyle’s stern Texas father (Ben Reed), who admonishes his young son by ordering him to become neither “wolf” nor “sheep” but “sheepdog,” never forgetting to protect his kith and kin by any means necessary. This boy has a gift, hunter-gatherer Dad proclaims while bagging a deer, and that’s his talent as a crack shot.

From that near-biblical epiphany, Chris follows his destiny, first as a rodeo star and then as an elite Navy SEAL. He laconically enlists Tara (Sienna Miller) as his dutiful wife, who almost literally stands by her man barefoot and pregnant for much of the movie, serving also to wail and anguish over Chris’ perils via satellite phone while he’s terminating all those big bad wolves, a.k.a. “damned savages,” in Baghdad and Ramadi.

Over Kyle’s four tours of duty from 2003 to 2009, we’re plunged into chaotic, bloody house-to-house battles, helplessly trapped in the first-person sights of Chris on sniper “overwatch” while he coolly blows the heads off enemy insurgents from stealth lookouts. As Kyle’s official kills surge with numbing speed, he’s unofficially promoted into “The Legend” by his profane, backslapping buddies, a reputation that causes the insurgents to put a bounty on his head.

Bearded and bulked-up like Steroids Era baseballer, Cooper drawls his way into a convincing, if one-dimensional, portrayal of a man on a mission (“Hooyah!”), stoically unburdened by shooter’s remorse. While watching his brothers’ backs, Kyle also pursues with a vengeance his evil mirror image, a long-range assassin (Sammy Sheik) primarily uploaded into the plot to stamp a “Mission Accomplished” seal on what, in awful fact, has become America’s endless Groundhog Day war in Iraq and the Mideast.

Like Kyle’s near-microscopic field of vision through his gun-site, Eastwood’s famously squinty gaze is just as narrow, his focus (and trigger) on the treacherous, beady-eyed, rag-headed insurgents who kill our boys, babble in alien Arabic and torture Iraqi kids with power drills. In this brutal but exquisitely simple world, it’s easy to pick out the sheepdogs and wolves, the good guys and evildoers. And, right on our shoulders, opposite the rifles, God is clearly, visibly, on our side.

American Sniper opens nationally in theaters Jan. 16.