American Sniper

I find it ironic that in the same month Bradley Cooper was famously seen rooting on the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Dallas Cowboys, a movie in which he plays a Texas country boy turned deadly sniper is released in the theaters and earns him an Oscar nomination. With that said, I do think that since he does such an excellent job in the role and in particular with mimicking the thick Texas accent, that will grant him a pardon from public execution the next time he happens to set foot on Texas soil; that is until the next football season starts up anyway. Texans never forget; Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis still hasn't been seen in public ever since he screwed up the National Anthem at a Houston Rockets game and that was 22 years ago! Now in the interest of keeping my site from being shut down permanently I will let you insert your own racist quote from a tobacco spitting hick here.

Well in Sniper, Clint Eastwood shows you all the events that contributed to Chris Kyle becoming of the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history; they included Sunday mornings in church with his family, breaking up bully fights in the school yard, and participating in horse bucking competitions with scrubs from Victoria, Texas. It was at this point that I almost walked out of the theater! My terrible hometown and the people in it should never be allowed on film or even on display in a public forum of any kind.

But back to the movie, as you can see Navy SEAL Kyle was raised in a decent home and had a set of good core values, so when he saw the awful events that were taking place in Afghanistan he couldn't help but enlist in the armed forces because he felt as though he needed to help defend this great country of ours. Now that's about as down home American as you can get!

You are taken through his training, the awkward and funny meeting of his wife, and the brutal situations and decisions that went into the killing of his enemy fighters or citizens; some of whose scenes are difficult to watch.  And that's what was so surprising about this Eastwood film, all of his movies are good to decent but they are never as good as the hype machine behind them. Well I thought this would fall into that same category with the thousands of ads they played online and on commercial breaks during football games; all you see are ridiculous lines like "Bradley Cooper gives the best performance of all time" While he is good in it, he wasn't that good; this wasn't Taxi Driver or anything.

But Cooper does more than just physically morph into Kyle by gaining 55 pounds, you actually forget that you're watching a frat boy whose just reciting lines some intern is reading off to him. He totally captures the physical and emotional demeanor of a Texas bred soldier and Eastwood does an excellent job of filming the fighting scenes around him. That was always a complaint of mine when it came to Eastwood films, his movies were always 90% drama and only 10% action. Well that's not the case in Sniper, you get all action you can ask for in a war movie featuring snipers.

It speaks volumes when the entire theater walks out after the credits in complete silence and it's because of this that I give it a rating of very FRESH!