American Sniper

Bradley Cooper proves his dramatic chops once more in Clint Eastwood's fine film "American Sniper."

The movie is based on the true story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, a sharp shooter who,over the course of four tours in Iraq, racked up more kills than any other sniper in military history. Kyle's bestselling memoir of the same title captured the public's imagination upon its publication in January, 2012.

The film does what movies do best: It tells a story, digging into its main character for complexity as well as bravura. There are elements of traditional dramatic fiction -- Kyle is pitted against an equally lethal marksman who fights for the other side, and he and other military service members hunt a sadistic ghoul dubbed "The Butcher" who gets off on killing and maiming with a power drill -- but these elements don't pull the movie off track, and "American Sniper" remains a character study rather than an adventure film, more "Hurt Locker" than "Enemy at the Gates."

In the course of lionizing Kyle, the movie does tend to ignore less heroic aspects of the man's story, including accusations that he fictionalized or embellished some of his exploits (including a claim, deleted from later editions of his memoir, that he punched out a celebrity referred to as "Scruff Face," identified outside the book as Jesse Ventura). In fact, the film never acknowledges that Kyle even wrote a memoir -- which may be just as well, since that could have shifted the focus, to no worthwhile effect.

Less defensible is how the movie yanks at viewers' reflexive patriotism by including a scene in which Kyle and his wife-to-be Taya (Sienna Miller's terrific in her role as Cooper is in his) stare in horror at television coverage of 9/11, before moving on to Kyle's deployments to Iraq with no effort made to correct the still-widespread (and wholly incorrect) belief that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the bin Laden-masterminded attacks of 2001.

Historic authenticity and politics aside, however, this film is a moving portrait of what warfare costs soldiers and their families -- a theme that's given harrowing life in a sequence in which a phone call home is interrupted by a sudden firefight. A pregnant Taya listens to sounds of the battle, gasping, not sure what to make of what she's hearing; your heart hammers for her sake as much as Kyle's.

Kyle was shot and killed by a fellow veteran even as the script was being completed, a turn of events that led to further script development with input from Taya Kyle. We learn about this in "One Soldier's Story: The Journey of American Sniper," one of the Blu-ray's two special features. It's a slick bit of work, including interviews with Taya, Eastwood, Cooper, screenwriter Jason Hall, and the film's producers, and given PBS-style narration. The other special feature is an endless shill for Oscar attention, a cynical and manipulative piece of advertising titled "The Making of American Sniper," which turns out to be a mix of review blurbs, interview snippets, and scenes from the movie.

The film is definitely worth adding to your shelf, alongside other Eastwood classics -- it's not just a great modern war movie, it's a warrior's movie. The two featurettes add little to the film's power or meaning, though "One Soldier's Story: The Journey of American Sniper," does provide fascinating context for fans of the film, the memoir, or Chris Kyle himself. "The Making of American Sniper," however, actually detracts from the experience, given its crass and brazen self-promotion.

"American Sniper"
Blu-ray/DVD Combo
$44.95
http://www.warnerbros.com/american-sniper