American Sniper demonstrates that Hollywood doesn’t know how to make war movies.

Let’s walk through this paragraph.

The list of films that stand in stark thematic contrast to American Sniper is long. Just to name a few: MTV Films made Stop-Loss, with Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which a group of young soldiers nearly run off to Mexico rather than go back to Iraq. It was little more than a sexed-up infomercial warning young men off military service. In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, was a tepid murder mystery masquerading as a morbid meditation on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Washed-up auteur Brian De Palma made Redacted, a graphic film about American soldiers who rape an Iraqi girl and murder her family. Matt Damon starred in Green Zone, a heavy-handed thriller about a government conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq. (Green Zone was loosely based on the work of Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was widely rebuked for misrepresenting his need to be evacuated by helicopter from his military embed in Afghanistan. The real reason he wanted out: to attend the film’s celebrity-studded premiere.) John Cusack was a twofer. First he starred in Grace Is Gone, a film that egregiously wallows in the grief of a man who can’t bring himself to tell his kids his wife was killed serving in Iraq. Then he made War, Inc., a painfully unfunny satire about corporate profiteers amid a war in the fictional country of Turaqistan.

Here are the lifetime grosses (all via Box Office Mojo) for those listed movies:

Put another way: American Sniper outgrossed all of them pretty much the first day. Now, if you include The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty‘s lifetime grosses, you eventually will get a number that beats American Sniper’s (165.8 million to currently $135.7) . That will probably stay true until, say, Sunday afternoon.

Normally, I would write something along the lines of This doesn’t mean that American Sniper is good while the other movies suck, except that it’s generally conceded that – with the two exceptions of Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, generally speaking all of those movies sucked. Because Hollywood only grudgingly makes war movies that people might want to actually watch.  And they won’t stop, either, which is a shame. All that money, just being left on the table…

Well. They’d just spend it all on cocaine, anyway.

Moe Lane

PS: I would have liked to have seen this film this week, yes. I also would have liked to not discover that my youngest kid was going to be home all week, sudden snow storms, and my wife’s side mirror sideswiped.  As weeks go, I am happy that this one is almost over.