From my movie review in Taki’s Magazine:

So after a near-decade of Eastwood’s movies being a little overrated, nobody was expecting too much from American Sniper, a mid-budget drama based on the memoir of the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Steven Spielberg, a passionate skeet shooter, had been developing American Sniper, but when Warner Brothers wouldn’t OK a lavish budget, he passed it on to the skinflint Eastwood.

Clint’s movie just works, beginning with the now famous opening scene used in the trailer. Leave it to Eastwood to figure out that the easy way to make an effective trailer is not to mash up all your explosion shots, but to just reuse your most gripping scene, leaving potential ticket buyers wondering: What happens next?

There’s not much plot to the movie, other than Spielberg’s idea of an insurgent who is an Olympic gold medal marksman, to serve, as Walter Sobchak would say, as the worthy adversary. (In reality, Arabs are the prototypical “spray and pray” shooters. All the Arab countries combined won only four of the 774 shooting medals awarded at the last Olympics.) This antagonist is made a visiting Al-Qaeda jihadist from Syria rather than a native Iraqi, to get around the problem of “Because we live here” (to quote John Milius’s Red Dawn).