It’s a scenario any actor/director would dream of. Starting with success in front of the TV camera in the 1950s and graduating to the big screen — something of a rarity at thetime — a move to the director’s chair kicks off a career that produced four Oscars and a seemingly never-ending list of award nominations.
Sixty-five years later, Clint Eastwood is still making movies and one of his more controversial titles, American Sniper, has just arrived on Netflix.
After the personal career highs of revisionist western Unforgiven (1992) and boxing drama Million Dollar Baby (2004), both of which won him Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, Eastwood continued making films that not only attracted critical acclaim but were a hit with audiences. His last personal Academy Award nomination came for American Sniper (2014), which put him back in the running for Best Picture, but the statuette went to Birdman. Since then, he’s been less prolific but films like
Sully (2016), Richard Jewell (2019) and, most recently, Juror #2 (2024) have all been well received.
American Sniper took Eastwood into what was then new territory for him. No stranger to war films, both as actor and director, he moved into modern warfare with the story of real-life Navy S.E.A.L. marksman, Chris Kyle, who racked up more than 160 confirmed kills during his time in Iraq.
Based on his autobiography of the same name — one that more than echoed the title of Brett Easton Ellis’s satire — the movie follows him through an adolescence where his skill with a rifle is evident, but then becomes the focus of his life after he joins the military and is on active service. He has a loving wife at home, but what brings him alive is the thrill of the kill when he’s away, the nerve-shredding anticipation and those shots fired between heartbeats.
Finding it impossible to leave the war behind, his family life starts to disintegrate and there seems to be little or nothing he can do to prevent the inevitable.
Making a movie about one of the most controversial wars of modern times put Eastwood’s approach to filmmaking in the critical spotlight, with questions surrounding his style of stripping back the story so it was only seen from Kyle’s perspective. But he’s always been a lean director, refusing to be weighed down by sub-plots and relying instead on his central characters to do most of the heavy lifting.
In the title role, Bradley Cooper called time on the bawdy comedy of The Hangover trilogy to deliver a committed performance, full of conflict and anguish. He piled on over 40lbs to play the role, spending hours studying footage of the real Chris Kyle and learning to use a rifle with real-life Navy S.E.A.L. sniper Kevin Lacz, who had served with Kyle and was a consultant on the movie.
![American Sniper - Official Trailer [HD] - YouTube](https://i0.wp.com/img.youtube.com/vi/99k3u9ay1gs/maxresdefault.jpg?w=696&ssl=1)
It was the first time Cooper had worked with Eastwood and the result was one of his most magnetic performances, one that points towards the power and presence we’ve seen more recently in the likes of A Star Is Born (2018) and as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro (2023). But the choice of the actor to play his wife, Taya, was crucial to the balance of the film, and Eastwood showed true inspiration in going for Sienna Miller.
As the woman who always supports her husband but is never afraid to challenge him, it demonstrates why she’s carved out a niche for herself in playing earthy women confronted by difficult situations and fighting their way through. She was the perfect on-screen partner for Cooper.
In a movie which is equally dramatic and thought-provoking, Eastwood is looking at a specific war but posing some universal questions and none of them have easy answers. That it’s based on the life of a real person makes them even more pertinent. Chris Kyle died in 2013, never living to see the film, but when it was in the early stages of development, he met Bradley Cooper, who recalled to People, “he said if he had a choice of who would direct the movie, it would be Clint Eastwood.” He got his wish, a film that tells his story with clear eyes and consummate skill.
American Sniper was added to Netflix in the US on Monday, April 21, and is on Prime Video in the UK.