Movie treatment of sniper’s story hit and miss

American Sniper (Blu-ray) Warner Bros. (out of five)

A training sergeant tells Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) early on in American Sniper to aim small. That way you miss small.

It’s tough to nitpick with filmmakers like Cooper and director Clint Eastwood, but there were small misses throughout what could have become a classic war film.

Telling the real-life story of Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history, American Sniper traces his journey from recruit to Iraq and back home again.

The film’s finest moments come in with Cooper (in probably his best performance) interacting with his fellow soldiers, his family or his wife (Sienna Miller). Kyle’s unwillingness to see his war as anything but noble, his enemies as nothing but “savages” and his colleagues’ struggles as anything but weakness should make you hate him. But Cooper plays it all with a hint of pain behind the stubbornness making you see a man facing uncountable internal and external struggles.

The battle scenes are mostly well done, but sometimes slip into bad 1980s action flick mode with the good guy Americans battling a seemingly unkillable super soldier from the Middle East. While based on reality, those moments could have been cut down in the two-hour plus movie.

The Blu-ray release comes with two making-of documentaries which repeat themselves, though one with the backstory of how the movie came to be is well worth watching.

— Tim Switzer

Battlestar Galactica: The Definitive Collection (Bluray) Universal (out of five)

This monstrous remastered blu-ray set includes: Battlestar Galactica 35th Anniversary Theatrical Version, Battlestar Galactica: The Original Series (Widescreen and Full Frame) and Galactica 1980: The Complete Series (Wide screen and Full Frame). I’m not sure why, but there is quite a difference in the full frame 1.33:1 and widescreen 1.78:1 remastered versions of Battlestar Galactica with the full frame version clearly winning out in the remaster. That said, the widescreen presentation is still very watchable — it’s just that purists will appreciate the full frame version more. The show also features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack.

Created by Glen Larson, the series starts with the destruction of the human colonies by the Cylons, a cybernetic civilization at war with the Twelve Colonies. The series follows the last Battlestar, Galactica, as it leads a ragtag fleet of refugees in a search for their long-lost original homeworld, planet Earth. The show wasn’t all Cylons, sometimes you were introduced to a trio of bloodthirsty Borellians or met a new race of people such as in the episode: The Young Lords where Galactica must trade equipment for grain on a rural planet plagued by the Borays, a group of piglike marauders.

The show featured a fascinating cast including Canadian actor Lorne Greene as Commander Adama, Richard Hatch as Capt. Apollo, John Colicos as Baltar, Anne Lockhart as Sheba and Dirk Benedict as Lt. Starbuck. The one-year series also featured some amazing guest stars such as Jane Seymour, Lloyd Bridges and Fred Astaire.

A series spinoff did appear some months later in the guise of Galactica 1980. Despite initially promising ratings, the show became victim to lacklustre writing and was panned by critics and fans alike. Galactica 1980 was cancelled after only 10 episodes.

Bonus features include deleted scenes, pilot episode audio commentary, remembering Battlestar Galactica which takes us on a 45-minute retrospective of the series.

— Don Healy

Lovesick (DVD) Anchor Bay (out of five)

When a comedy leaves you rolling your eyes more often than laughing, it’s obviously lacking something. Not many hits, but lots of misses in Lovesick.

A romantic comedy should have you cheering for the couple to get together and live happily ever after ― not wishing the girl would make a run for it because this guy is not worth the grief.

Matt LeBlanc stars as Charlie Darbie, a guy who has everything going for him. He has a great job as an elementary school principal. He has supportive friends. Life is good ― with one exception. All he’s missing is love.

But every time Charlie falls for a girl, he goes clinically insane. It’s something about his brain chemistry changing. The result is not pretty. He has to find a way to overcome his psychosis if he’s ever going to have a chance at true love.

When he meets former dancer Molly Kingston (played by Ali Larter), Charlie may have found his perfect match. But his condition kicks in ― on overdrive. His friend Jason (Adam Rodriguez) and wacky neighbour Lester (Chevy Chase) try to help save Charlie from himself.

Charlie’s antics should be hilarious, but sadly, they’re not.

No extras included.

— Irene Seiberling

The Pyramid (Blu-ray/Digital HD) 20th Century Fox ½ (half a star out of five)

The scene: The Egyptian desert, where a satellite has discovered a three-walled pyramid beneath the sand.

The characters: Two archeologists, a dad and a daughter from the States — he’s old-school and she’s trying to pave her own career from under his wing; their Egyptian aide/the daughter’s love interest and his expensive NASA robot; and two documentarians, the full-of-herself woman host and the meek shooter man — who is in many scenes, in spite of the film trying to pull off found-footage style. The plot: They want to see inside the pyramid, so they send in the robot, which is mysteriously wrecked early on. So the team goes in.

Spoilers, because you should not bother watching this film: They all die. Someone says the pyramid seems to have been built to keep something from escaping. Good bit of foreshadowing, that. The “somethings” are zombie sphinx cats and the half-man/half-jackal god Anubis.

I can’t think of one redeeming quality. This movie is terrible.

Extras include: an extended ending, space archeology, Egyptian myth.

— Ashley Martin

Wet Hot American Summer (Blu-ray) Universal (out of five)

David Wain was onto something back in 2001 when he made this spoof of 1980s summer camp movies.

Consider the top-billed stars for the movie: David Hyde Pierce and Janeane Garofalo. Both fine comedians in their own right. Pierce was in the middle of a run on Fraser and Garofalo was the face of alternative comedy.

But then remember those who also starred — the likes of Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper (back before his three Oscar nominations) who would all go on to become some of the biggest names in comedy.

The mix of a couple established stars and up-andcomers who would take over Hollywood proved an unbeatable mix in telling the interlocking tales on the final day of Camp Firewood.

The comedy here is crude (and definitely not for everybody) and increasingly off the wall (so, increasingly not for everyone as well) and mocks everything from sports cliches, the tortured Vietnam vet, training montages, melodramatic teenage love triangles and — my personal favourite — heroic rescues.

The Blu-ray release — a first for this movie — includes a rehash of extras included on previous DVD versions and is likely only coming out to promote the prequel series coming to Netflix this summer, but really, who cares?

The live performances done by the movie’s cast years later are particularly impressive.

— Tim Switzer