The characters in Eastwood’s movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who’s the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we’re to applaud on the other.

Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq that critics pronounced not political! That’s as Hollywood as Hollywood gets. Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with pride, that the root of the film’s success is that “it’s about a real person,” and “it’s a human story, not a political one.” “ American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!” gushed Brandon Griggs of CNN, noting the film’s record $105 million opening-week box office. It’s the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people, that’s the problem. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question. Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.īut to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming. The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper? Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture.

American sniper netflix