od, family, country.” After the awkward dysrhythmia of Jersey Boys (a musical with a tin ear for its tunes), Clint Eastwood is back in the saddle with this bleak western-inflected thriller. Adapted from the autobiography of Chris Kyle, a navy Seal (nicknamed “the Legend” – really) who racked up more than 160 confirmed kills as a marksman in Iraq, American Sniper finds Eastwood returning once again to Unforgiven’s thorny themes of guns and retribution in tensely cinematic fashion. That the title (taken from the book) should ironically echo Bret Easton Ellis’s satirically vitriolic portrait of male psychosis is appropriate, the film allowing its audience to view Kyle as either hero or villain – or both.

Bradley Cooper, who saw this project passed from Steven Spielberg to Eastwood, is understatedly conflicted as Kyle, whom we first meet on a Fallujah rooftop, a woman and child in his rifle sights. Spiralling back to the young marksman’s first kill on a hunting trip, we learn that hesitation is a weakness and hear Kyle’s dad explain that there are only three types of people: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Yet after the 9/11 attacks, Kyle seems more coyote than collie, his family life collapsing as war takes its toll, only at peace when his killer instinct is in play. He may have a loving wife (the lately impressive Sienna Miller) at home, but it’s gunfire that puts lead in his pencil; what heavy breathing there is here comes from pre-trigger exhalation, shots fired between heartbeats (after lengthy voyeuristic foreplay), in moments of lethal ecstasy. Later, a wounded veteran talks of getting his balls back on the pumping end of a rifle butt.

Eastwood plays all this with a poker face, and some viewers have taken it at face value, with polarising results. Perhaps, like Flags of our Fathers (which Eastwood paired with Letters from Iowa Jima), American Sniper needs a more didactic balancing element; Spielberg wanted to expand the role of the Iraqi sniper who becomes Kyle’s nemesis, but Eastwood has stripped things back so that we observe the action through American eyes only, our focus as blinkered as that of its titular killer. As such, it makes for disturbing viewing, the understandably clumsy closing coda (necessitated by events in 2013) forcing the film finally towards flag-waving endorsement in the face of unfolding tragedy at home.

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