Oscar special: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is a bad copy of The Hurt Locker

In 2008, we saw a movie where an American soldier stationed in Iraq, during the invasion, goes through a severe psychological changeover. He’s so into the war and he’s so good at warfare that he finds it difficult to go back to his life back home. Social life makes him awkward. Shopping seems like a mundane activity to him and the only thing that makes him smile is talking to his mates at the warfront. That movie was called The Hurt Locker. In 2015, we’ve got another movie about a soldier and it’s called American Sniper. It’s a very similar film, only much less interesting. [caption id=“attachment_2050377” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Eight years after Letters to Iwo Jima, director Clint Eastwood goes back to the warzone with American Sniper, based on the autobiography of Chris Kyle who was the most successful sniper rifle specialist stationed in Iraq. Bradley Cooper, bulked and bearded, is pretty good as Kyle, complete with a heavy and convincing Southern accent. Kyle’s journey in Iraq is very much like that of the protagonist of The Hurt Locker. He’s sent there as a prodigy, excels in his work by killing locals and saving American lives, and slowly comes under the effect of PTSD and eventually struggles to feel at home in peace and quiet. It’s fine to tell a story that’s been told before, but not in a soulless manner. American Sniper goes through the motions like a standard Hollywood bottom-feeding machine. There are certain plot points one expects from a standard issue war action drama: themes of brotherhood and jingoism, the scene where a friend is shot, an ambush, sticky situations where negotiations must be made, and an antagonist who has the same set of skills as the protagonist but can’t be allowed to win. American Sniper has all these as well as the stench of pretentious, self-important direction that wants you to believe it’s showing you something new. One would expect a movie named American Sniper to showcase something interesting about the way a sniper works and how he is different from the other machine gun trotting foot soldiers in the army. No such luck, because it doesn’t matter what weapon you put in Kyle’s hands, he’s the same patriotic nice guy that you’ve seen a billion times in cinema. And it doesn’t matter if he’s played by Bradley Cooper, the character is so clichéd you could replace him with Jack Nicholson and it wouldn’t make any difference. The most disappointing thing about the film is that it doesn’t even make up for the lack of originality with exciting action sequences. Every bullet fired in American Sniper just reminds you how great other films were, and how dull this movie is. You have to hand it to Spielberg and Ridley Scott for creating a whole genre of cinema with Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down – every single war movie since then has borrowed from these two movies. When American Sniper steers away from the action to focus on the drama, it stumbles even harder because the film’s emotional anchor is the frightfully charmless Sienna Miller as Taya, Kyle’s wife. There is no chemistry between Cooper and Miller, and their romance is snooze-inducing at best. The only thing American Sniper has going for it is the cinematography by Tom Stern who continues his good work with Eastwood. While it’s impressive that Eastwood is still making half-decent films at his age, he needs to pick scripts that would do justice to his efforts. American Sniper is neither awards worthy nor a crowd-pleasing piece of escapist entertainment – it’s an awkward combination of the worst side of both those aspects. At the the end, a shocking detail is presented as an end note, rather than as a plot point. It makes one wonder where the director of Mystic River has disappeared.