Bradley Cooper stars in 'American Sniper'

SOME 70 YEARS after Gary Cooper played a country sharpshooter turned war hero in "Sergeant York," Bradley Cooper plays another in "American Sniper."

He's Chris Kyle, a Texan who became a Navy SEAL marksman, serving four tours in Iraq during the worst of the fighting, and killing 160 combatants, confirmed.

In Clint Eastwood's engrossing "American Sniper," adapted from Kyle's blunt memoir, we see that he learned the craft of shooting on hunts with his father.

Kyle's father also teaches Chris a worldview, dividing people into three groups - the sheep, the wolves who prey on them, and the sheepdogs who protect the herd.

The best are the sheepdogs - they turn controlled aggression into a force that protects life, with violence if need be.

Kyle takes it to heart - it's not just his skill with a weapon that makes him an effective sniper, it's his fervent belief in what he is doing.

He's decisive and deadly.

The movie's money line? "I'm prepared to meet my maker and answer for every shot I took."

Which sounds less like Alvin York ("Sgt. York" highlights his status as a conscientious objector in World War I) and more like Clint Eastwood.

Who nonetheless understands that it isn't 1941, when audiences didn't know from post-traumatic stress disorder. Eastwood knows he's obliged to be straight with people about combat and its consequences, and he is. He uses his terse style in the movie's vivid combat scenes to capture the intensity of firefights and their necessary toll on the men involved.

And he casts Cooper, who bulks up (and twangs up) to mimic Kyle physically but plays him with a vulnerability you do not find in Kyle's book.

Key scene: Kyle on a typical "overwatch," concealed on a rooftop, protecting patrols on the street. When he's called upon to draw a bead on a boy running with a grenade, the soul-grinding burden of the situation registers in Cooper's face in a way that does not in Kyle's writing.

By Kyle's third tour, the stress of combat has changed him, which his wife (Sienna Miller, in an undeveloped role, is the movie's weakest feature) now sees but Kyle denies in spite of facts. When the pregnant Mrs. Kyle visits the doctor, a concerned obstetrician takes Kyle's resting blood pressure. It's 180 over 110.

Kyle begins to admit that time and risk are working against him. Eastwood, in a major departure from the book, gives this dread a physical presence, via the character of an Iraqi sniper (a minor figure in Kyle's memoir) assigned to stalk and kill Kyle, now a kind of demon celebrity among the Iraqis.

It's one of the ways that Eastwood pares down his subject's stoic zeal (and excises some of his boasts, like the one that lost Kyle a defamation suit brought by Jesse Ventura).

Kyle was not a man to reflect upon the larger purpose/effectiveness of the Iraq war, nor did he have much interest in Iraqi people or their culture. But he served with SEALs who did, and Eastwood makes sure we hear the words of one of them, Marc Lee, in his last letter home as it is read aloud at his funeral. (This is taken from life, and the letter can be found online.)

Some have argued that by softening Kyle, Eastwood does the man a disservice. Perhaps, but his aggregation of SEAL combat experience and perspective is helpful, since it expands on what Kyle himself was not inclined to address.

Kyle wasn't very good at explaining his ordeal after the war. He writes about a drinking problem, then scaring himself straight after a drunk-driving incident.

Maybe that's true.

But we're left with the fact that Kyle was killed by a vet suffering PTSD. A vet Kyle was trying to help.

In his book My Life as a Foreign Country, Iraq vet Brian Turner wonders if "America . . . is a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home."

Even if most men like Kyle manage to find some way to deal with their experiences, his murder suggests some men will not. Perhaps "Sniper," Kyle's final act of "overwatch," will bring attention to them.

Online: ph.ly/Movies