3:45-ish: About seven minutes into our showing of Clint Eastwood's Iraq War drama American Sniper - newly nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture - there's a series of digital-projection snafus that result in the loss of sound and eventual freezing of the screen image. (When a patron shouts, "It's North Korea's fault!", the tension-breaker is especially amusing because the image we're frozen on is a Sony TV.) The problem is quickly corrected with apologies and efficiency, but it does mean starting the movie over again ... at which point I sigh, because the opening seven minutes are awful. Okay, the part with Bradley Cooper's heroic sharpshooter Chris Kyle targeting the Iraqi woman and kid - in effect, the movie's trailer - is good, if not nearly as intense as the preview suggested. But then we get an extended flashback to Chris as a kid, hunting and goofing around in church and listening to Dad's pithy bromides, and it's all so earnest, compositionally obvious, and verbally painful that I slouch down and prepare for the inevitable: Unbroken 2: Still Not Broken. Eventually, thankfully, this mostly hagiographic bio-pic got better - if never great, primarily because nearly everything involving poor Sienna Miller as Chris' eternally teary-eyed spouse is unconvincing. (Weeping through the hoariest clichés screenwriter Jason Hall can conceive, she's even forced to utter that famously hackneyed "I won't be here when you get back" lie.) There's also overly convenient melodrama in the Iraqi sniper who's like a real-life projection of Chris' internal struggle - a familiar Eastwood trope - and so much foreshadowing that I was amazed characters could still see the sun. Yet Eastwood's staging of the combat scenes, if unremarkable, is at least blunt and effective, the sound effects and squib work are consistently superb, and Hall's dialogue hums whenever troops are just razzing one another; like the uncharacteristically bulky Cooper's portrayal, the movie itself proves solid, unfussy, and sincere. I may not have joined in the crowd's rapturous applause at the end, but as meat-and-potatoes experiences go, American Sniper is nourishing enough - if, for some of us, also pretty undercooked.
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