Rolling Stone reviewer: ‘American Sniper’ filled with ‘countless crass stupidities’

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi took shots at “American Sniper,” the blockbuster movie about U.S. sniper Chris Kyle, saying director Clint Eastwood filled the screen with “crass stupidities” and “meaningless” drivel, and that the film’s politics were slightly left of ridiculous.

“I saw ’American Sniper’ last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to,” Mr. Taibbi began.

He called it a “simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves us a neatly arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences. … It’s usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food.”

He then referred to the popularity of “Forrest Gump,” set during the Vietnam War era.

He went on: “But even by the low standards of this business, [this film] manages to sink to a new depth or two … [T]o turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold … who slowly, very slowly starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children — Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.”

Mr. Taibbi called the movie’s politicos “so ludicrous and idiotic, that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. 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.”

And of Mr. Eastwood, he wrote: “Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie,” like the scene of the “shirtless, buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife.”

He then says the “fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people … [is] the problem.”

And his conclusion?

“Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards,” he wrote. “Sometimes there’s no such thing as ’just a human story.’ Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context and this is one of them.”