American Sniper features Bradley Cooper in perhaps his finest role. He plays Chris Kyle, a Navy Seal during the Iraqi war. Based on a true story, Kyle would go on to become a highly decorated war hero.
Kyle is a good ol’ boy from the south. Family means everything to him, and he sees his fellow Americans as family. This patriotism leads him to enlist, and immediately go out for the Navy Seals to become one of the best. Early on he meets his future wife, and no sooner is he married with a child on the way, he is shipped off to Iraq. There he starts to build a name for himself, to the point that when he returns for his second tour (he would go on to have four total!), he sees he has gained the nickname “Legend.”
The surface story of the film is a sort of one-on-one battle between Kyle and his counterpart on the other side, a trained Syrian sniper and former Olympian marksman named Mustafa. Kyle spends his days trying to protect the soldiers on the ground, while Mustafa is often across the city trying to take them out. But inside the movie, the focus is more on Kyle trying to internally reconcile the cold blooded person he is in Iraq with his family when he comes home. He creates a wall around himself that keeps everyone but his brothers-in-arms at a distance, even his wife and kids. Cooper portrays this struggle to an amazing degree. You feel for him, and hope that by the end he can achieve the same success at home as he has with the military.
If you look up Chris Kyle online you’ll see he was perhaps not always the nice guy shown in the film, but this is Hollywood after all, and as a stand alone film, it is easy to get caught up rooting for Kyle to find his way.
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