Matt Taibbi is underwhelmed by American Sniper:
Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There’s the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the “human story.”
Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle’s officers suggests that they could “win the war” by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America’s peaceful occupation of Sadr City.
Look, I get it’s a movie. Movies end. They need an ending, and the sort of 4GW morass into which Iraq has ever so predictably descended isn’t suitable. So, it’s understandable that Eastwood turns it into a story with a coherent ending, right down to the dramatic mano-a-mano that is conventional in these sorts of war movies. And it is refreshing to see Hollywood take the side of an American soldier for a change.
But that doesn’t make that line any more intelligent. It just doesn’t.