REVIEW: American Sniper (2015)

Having seen this film long after it was released and long after the media attention has passed, it is difficult to watch it without some of the critical commentary staying in mind. Most reviews – apart from the mainstream ones, for which the quality of a film is how exciting it is as a thriller or how moving a drama – dealt with the politics of the film, and seemed fairly split down the middle about where the film stood on its subject, Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed kills, and the Iraq war.

The reviews on this blog have of late verged into political commentary – particularly where war films set in Afghanistan or Iraq are concerned – and so American Sniper would seem to be the perfect film to indulge in further political ‘whingeing.’ Though, with this film, there is a stumbling block. Clint Eastwood has kept things fairly reserved in this film, the commentary or critique is essentially in the eye of the viewer and whether one finds American Sniper a glorifying or tragic and accusing spectacle is down to one’s own prejudice. As mine falls towards a distaste for this war, I will empathise the critique supposedly at the heart of the film.

Clint Eastwood is not a great filmmaker, though he is a very good one. His aesthetic (I imagine he would grunt derisively at the word, just as John Ford would have) is easy and unrushed, giving his films, particularly the later ones, a feeling of cool confidence. Where a film like Mystic River didn’t really work, its subject matter too traumatic for such level-headed treatment (this issue was somehow resolved by the time we get to Changeling), something as daft as Hereafter can be elevated by a convincing sadness and a judicious and effective use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2. His best film as director is, of course, Unforgiven, but Eastwood has always had a fondness for debunking myths and questioning how they come about and impact on reality from the time of his apprenticeship with Leone and Siegel (to whom Unforgiven is dedicated). This is present in Flags of Our Fathers, J.Edgar, Jersey Boys and now American Sniper (though a lot less visible in Invictus). Chris Kyle was even named ‘the Legend’ by his army buddies.

American Sniper, then, may take a less patriotic and optimistic look at Kyle and the Iraq war and America’s fascination with violence. Remember again that Eastwood has lately avoided any idea of redemptive violence – the final shoot-out of Unforgiven is a psychopathic bloodbath, the hanging at the end of Changeling is ugly no matter what the characters onscreen think, the promised shoot-out in Gran Torino is slyly taken away from the audience. The opening scene, in which Kyle’s sights are trained on a young boy running towards US soldiers with a grenade, is suddenly replaced by a sequence in which Kyle’s on edge father teaches him to hunt, drawing a parallel (and here I am reading the film as I want to) between America’s warmongering abroad and their glorification of guns and strength at home. We see Kyle’s pre-army days – all machismo and guns and faux-cowboy silliness – as being essentially leading to his signing up for the army – the direct causal link is, awkwardly, the advent of 9/11 but the seeds had been sown earlier. The film does not condemn Kyle for what he does, but more subtly criticizes a culture that too readily puts men in war without the support they need to survive it.

The depiction of the war is rightly ugly and violent and largely without context. Kyle’s different tours are numbered 1 to 4, but we are not given an insight into specific dates or events, making the war appear confused and seemingly endless. Eastwood never allows his audience to enjoy the action, instead making war hellish. Scenes of Kyle’s life on tour and back home on leave are intercut, creating a jarring shift in registers. Kyle’s confusion is heightened in a great sequence when, on leave, he suspects a jeep with closing in on him and his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) – a sequence shot and cut as if we really are back in Iraq. Eastwood does not hold back on the gruesomeness of the war, but he also never makes it heroic or positive. We are always aware that it is having a negative effect on Kyle.

The film complicates the audience’s enjoyment further by having Kyle’s first killing be a child. Further talk of Kyle having ‘popped his cherry’ in the next scene only feels thoroughly crass and further emphasises the issue of a culture that can normalise the murder of a child (later, an injured veteran will hit a target on a firing range and say, in triumph, “Damn, if that doesn’t feel like I got my balls back”, drawing another parallel between guns and sex). Another great sequence acts as a further counterpoint – a child approaches a murdered man’s rocket launcher and picks it up, Kyle, the child in his sights, begging him to drop it – a horrifying moment, brilliantly made. Where the previous scene had ended negatively, this scene ends positively, only further emphasising the horror and the loss that could have been. However, these critiques are not limited to the culture around Kyle. The final scene in the film – incongruously given a date - has Kyle approaching his wife with a gun. We are clearly set up to think that there is about to be some kind of horrible accident. It is a frightening scene and again emphasises the dangers of being so comfortable around a gun.

The film ends with this scene, making the tactful decision to not depict Kyle’s recent death, and actual footage of his funeral and a procession of American flags hung from overpasses, revealing that the film is primarily a tragedy of a man trapped by a gun-loving culture and its result, an endless war. American Sniper, then, is an anti-war film, in that war is only depicted as damaging. It suggests that the war is as much to do with the American gung-ho character by showing how perverse this character is. Too often misunderstood as a celebration of slaughter, it is more a grim attempt to show that America’s problem abroad have roots at home. That said, American Sniper continues the long tradition to American war films of showing the damage wrought on the American side and no other. For all its critiques, American Sniper remains a film that ignores the horrors of war for non-Americans – an ethno-centric view that is arguably just as damaging as an outright bloodthirsty celebration.

Hit & Run (2012)

Hit & Run is a low-budget action-comedy car chase film that has a slew of influences and yet seems to be entirely the product of its writer, co-producer, co-director, co-editor and star Dax Shepard, who has also cast fiancée Kristen Bell and mate Bradley Cooper.

Charlie Bronson (Dax Shepard), whose name comes more from the infamous British prisoner than the stone-faced star, is in Witness Protection, hiding out in Milton, California, with his girlfriend Annie (Kristen Bell) and his bungling US Marshal protector Randy (Tom Arnold). Annie is a professor at the local college and has a doctorate in Non-Violent Conflict Resolution from Stanford. Instead of laying her off, her advisor Debbie (Kristen Chenoweth) gets her a job interview at a new Conflict Resolution faculty in the University of California in Los Angeles. Annie initially refuses to leave Charlie yet he decides to drive her there anyway.

Charlie cannot return to Los Angeles for fear of reprisals from Alexander Dmitri (Bradley Cooper), a former partner who was set to prison on Charlie’s evidence. However, it has been four years and Annie’s once-in-a-lifetime job is worth the risk. However, Annie’s jealous ex Gil (Michael Rosenbaum), suspicious of Charlie’s motives, follows them. He finds out Charlie’s real name and contacts Alexander. Alexander and his band of hoodlums are soon on Charlie’s trail.

Hit & Run most obviously refers back to such chase films as Smokey and the Bandit and Midnight Run, though there are a host of allusions. One musical cue during a romantic moment would recall the criminal lovers on the run classic Badlands where it not for the fact that the film seems more familiar with True Romance, which quotes the same music. The use of an LA storm drain could be a nod to either Grease or Point Blank. Charlie’s real name is Yul, in reference to Yul Brynner – apparently no one younger than Beau Bridges has ever heard of him. The references do not really add much to the film, but they do help position it as light nostalgia, making sure that its audience won’t expect too much.

As nostalgia, the film is neither funny nor exciting. As a car chase film, the car chases themselves are quite uninspiring. They are put together with a jittery editing style that makes them both confusing and distancing. You never feel that you are in the car with Charlie and Annie, nor do you feel that their driving is all that exhilarating. The chases feel like regressions after Tarantino’s awful but for the final car chase vanity project Death Proof. However, Hit & Run’s primary mode is Sunday afternoon light entertainment and anything too exciting or anything suggesting that the couple might be a danger might break the mood. Similarly, the film is never quite funny; it nods in that direction but never delivers on any laughs. An early sequence involving Randy shooting his own car could possibly have been funny except for the fact that it is not clear why he is shooting his car. Kristen Chenoweth does a spiel about Xanax as if Woody Allen never picked up a pen. The film’s opening scene tries for idyllic and touching romance and light comedy but comes off awkward and tacky. A surprising revelation that explains why Alexander feels so aggrieved is over-extended. Hit & Run is silly and freewheeling and yet it is heavily restrained in many ways.

Having said that, the film is, in retrospect, somewhat likeable. Annie’s doctorate in Non-Violent Conflict Resolution means that Charlie is not allowed to use violence for fear that he might disrespect her self-created degree. Following one frustrating confrontation with Gil, Charlie has to make do with covering him in exhaust smoke and dust. Later, while someone is checking out Charlie’s prized car – about which there is a lot of chatter – Charlie is foolish enough to use the word ‘fag’ for which he is reprimanded and forced to apologize. On top of that, there are a few gay characters in the film who, though primarily comic relief, are presented fairly realistically and certainly non-judgementally – probably the film’s only diversion from already-covered ground. The ending is similarly surprising since the film’s climax has more to do with Charlie helping out his girlfriend than with settling any old scores. It makes for a rather unsatisfying ending but it is a welcome change from the glut of redemption through carnage films that leave a bad taste in your mouth. Typically, Annie remains a woman entirely dependent on men, presumably the film’s willingness to be PC did not extend as far as its female characters. However, it is Charlie’s encouragement and consideration of Annie that wins her back, rather than his prowess with violence.

Hardly a deconstruction of the action genre, Hit & Run nevertheless ends up being a rather pacifist film – if only by comparison – in which Annie’s job interview deadline is more important than Charlie getting rid of Alexander once and for all. In this sense, it is much more of a romcom than it is an action film. The film is certainly post-PC in that it seems to recognise that violent actions films often do make you feel dirty afterwards. Hit & Run is primarily nostalgia, but it is surprisingly non-macho and open to diversity. If only it was more radical and less disposable. 

REVIEW: The Hangover Part II (2011)

  The Hangover Part II is the inevitable sequel to a film, which proved that comedies that were unfunny, unlikeable and thoroughly boring could be both commercial and critical hits. This one proves that they can have equally unfunny, unlikeable and thoroughly boring sequels.

  The film picks up two years after the events of the first film, with Stu (Ed Helms) preparing to fly over to Thailand for his wedding. Along comes Phil (Bradley Cooper) and, to everyone’s dismay, Alan (Zack Galifianakis). Finally, they all wake up in a sleazy hotel room in inner city Bangkok with someone missing and a wedding to get to.

  One of the main problems with The Hangover Part II is that it follows the exact structure of the first one, almost scene by scene, making it about as worthwhile as one of Haneke’s or Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remakes. There are no changes beyond the location and the species of animal that they have to deal with. Smugness pervades as we are dragged from one tired set piece to another without any improvements made to the equally tired formula of the first film. The lack of character development isn’t a shock, however, as it has been clearly shown before that these are not characters; these are loud, screaming, incredibly irritating voids. Alan is still weird, Stu is still having trouble asserting himself, Phil is still a child, Mr. Chow (a grating Ken Joeng) jumps out of something and everything stops for another terrible musical number. The idea seems to be that people will be happy to pay to see the first film again if you alter some slight details.

  It took three writers to string all of this together, an incoherent film filled with bits and pieces held together by a structure that has proven entirely unsuccessful. It’s a mystery film in which people look back at things that have already happened. We know the outcome and we can guess the reason, so why bother showing us. For example, Stu wakes up with the much-litigated Tyson tattoo. Why did he get it? Because he was drunk. Do we really need the film to get bogged down in the intricacies of how he got it?

  It is worth pointing out that none of this would particularly matter if the film was funny. Comedy is probably the only genre which can be gravely terrible in every way, but which can get away with it if it is funny. These films aren’t funny, because the characters aren’t well drawn and the situations they get into just aren’t believable. They aim for outlandish but manage only to become fantasy. At least Dude, Where’s My Car? was clever enough to become complete science fiction, rather than trying to convince the audience that all this could happen. Ultimately, however, the film just isn’t funny because it lacks any conceivable wit, uses only tried-and-tested jokes and repeats them again and again. And then a couple more times after that.

  If you like The Hangover then just watch it again. If you don’t, then pay for something worthwhile.