Going Nowhere, at Length

Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” follows the career of Navy Seal Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper), who racked up 160 official kills (255 unofficial) as a sniper in four tours of duty on Iraq.

The screenplay by Jason Hall follows Kyle’s memoir (titled “American Sniper”), and it follows a fairly straightforward path, with a flashback to the young Kyle hunting with his father, to the young man’s somewhat aimless life as a rodeo cowboy, then joining the Navy after the bombings of the United States embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998. The film covers his training as a Seal;  meeting his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) in a bar; their marriage; his first deployment. Things get complicated when he kills his first enemies — a mother and son attempting to throw explosives at Marines. Disappointed, Kyle tells a fellow Seal that it wasn’t what he had hoped for.

The insurgents have a master sniper named Mustafa, who can shoot accurately from great distances. As Kyle’s legend grows, the film begins to set up a sort of competition between the two.

I say “sort of” because there are a lot of half-baked ideas in “American Sniper.”

When Kyle comes home between tours, he is distant with his wife and children, except when he is overreacting to something. He straightens himself out by doing volunteer work with disabled soldiers, in the quickest diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in movie history.

In Iraq, Kyle is a leader, a bit of a maverick. He is able to spot Mustafa, but he also puts his unit in a very perilous position. And there is a tense scene in which a small boy picks up a weapon and aims it at an American vehicle, only to put it down because it is too big for him. Kyle sighs with relief at not having to shoot the boy.

All of these elements could have been developed further in this film, but they are not.

Rather, the message seems to be that war is horrible but necessary; that patriotism and service are good; family is good; helping those less fortunate is also good; and that’s that.

So what we have here are some terrific battle sequences that are not sanitized in the least, but are not shot in the kind of hallucinatory high resolution hyper-realism found in war films that more closely resemble video games.

Interspersed with these are the scenes of civilian life. And a rather abrupt ending.

Cooper is convincing as Kyle, and Miller is likable as Taya. The remaining characters are props, though  the performances are fine, as far as that goes.

Eastwood’s direction is unobtrusive. The film is not cluttered up with music or excessive special effects.

But “American Sniper” goes nowhere, and requires more than two hours to do so.

“American Sniper” is rated R for violence, language and sexual references. It is playing widely.