Kyle is already a sharpshooter even as a child when he was hunting deer with his dad in Texas. He later becomes a rodeo cowboy. When he sees on TV the news coverage of the U.S. embassy bombing in 1998, he joins the U.S.Navy and becomes a Navy Seal sniper. He marries Taya Renae (Sienna Miller) and is sent to Iraq after the bombing of the World Trade Center. He becomes a legend for his marksmanship.
He returns home when his son is born and his wife wishes he’d just stay home but he returns to Iraq for his second tour of duty. He’s assigned to hunt down terrorist Al Zarqawi and leads a house to house search in evacuated areas. He returns home when his daughter is born. But instead of staying home, he goes for a third and fourth tour of duty.
He is tasked to kill a deadly enemy sniper who shoots down American engineers. His team is placed inside enemy territory and in a climactic scene, Kyle sees the sniper who’s a mile away and gets him with a long distance shot that exposes his team to an attack of numerous enemy soldiers. It’s at this point that he calls his wife and tells her he’s going home for good.
He has initial difficulty adjusting to civilian life, telling a psychiatrist that he’s “haunted by all the guys he couldn’t save”. He is then encouraged to help disabled veterans soldiers. On February 2, 2013, he is shown bidding his wife and kids goodbye. Suddenly, there’s a subtitle saying “Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help”. The film ends with his funeral, with thousands of people attending his memorial service. Kyle was killed by a Marine veteran, Eddie Ray Routh, who’s suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and is now on trial for murder.
The film is very well acted by Cooper as Kyle (better here in “Silver Lining” and “American Hustle” for which he also got nominated) and Sienna Miller as his wife. The war and action scenes are very well crafted by Eastwood and makes us feel we’re watching actual war footage and not just a movie. It works because we care for the lead character. The movie opens with a scene where Kyle sees a woman and a boy with a grenade. He’s put in a dilemma on whether he’d kill a woman and a child. It's not an easy decision and Eastwood makes us an accomplice in Kyle's subsequent choice. It’s his first kill and many more follows during his stay in war-torn Iraq. Cooper won’t win the Oscar yet (our personal choice is Michael Keaton who gives a more gut-wrenching performance in “Birdman”) but he might win the next time as he has already paid his dues with three nominations.
What’s amazing about the war scenes is that Eastwood doesn’t resort to using a shaky handheld camera in shooting all the war scenes, which is very common nowadays for action films. It’s still taut and gripping. The movie shifts gears towards the end when it dwells on disabled veterans, something better portrayed in “Born on the 4th of July”, and the ending is quite abrupt. The film is filled with patriotism but it’s not a jingoistic piece of propaganda. It’s just about the life of men who serve in Iraq, their struggles, their hardship and the difficulties they have to cope with even when they’ve already returned home.
