There’s a scene in American Sniper where Bradley Cooper’s character, with complete sincerity, says that America is the greatest country in the world. As if the worth of countries can be quantified and as if America would be anywhere near the top if they could.

I feel that there’s a complete lack of objectivity in American Sniper. Clint Eastwood obviously feels that Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a great guy when his actions constantly suggest he’s anything but. From kicking down the doors of Iraqis, intimidating men, women and children, and beating up people in their own homes, he’s a reprehensible human being whose cowboy instincts are never used to help the Iraqi people but to perpetuate this mistaken idea of American exceptionalism.

In numerous scenes the American soldiers refer to the idigenous population as ‘savages’. I fully believe that soldiers talk this way, but I never felt that Eastwood was being objective. I feel that he, like the American characters in the movie, feel that they are somehow above the native population. Here the Americans are, rolling into Iraq to save everyone from themselves and their fucked up country, and what gratitude do they show? They don’t evacuate their homes when they’re supposed to and they even try and arm themselves against the invaders. What ingrates.

There’s no attempt here at any complexity. Chris Kyle is portrayed as a serious, committed soldier and the Iraqis are just cannon fodder. They even create a shadowy Syrian sniper counterpart called ‘The Butcher’ who slays people in cold blood and who is just generally filled with misplaced rage. He must be stopped of course by our heroic white hat.

One of the opening scenes has our hero hunting deer with his daddy as a child. Nevermind that Chris has taken his first life, his daddy chides him for not looking after his gun properly. Contrast this to an equivalent scene in Last of the Mohicans where the Native American characters hunt a deer and then give thanks to it after they kill it. They realize the enormity of what they’ve done and the sacrifice that has been made. Chris Kyle’s daddy is just concerned that Chris isn’t looking after his penis extension.

The end of the movie is basically a fantastical ‘my gun is better than your gun’ and ‘my dick is bigger than your dick’ showdown between Chris Kyle and the dastardly Butcher. Of course our hero triumphs with an impossible shot from about a mile away because he’s an American with a massive gun/penis and the other guy is just a little savage with a limp noodle.

The film makes an attempt to acknowledge the difficulties that Chris Kyle had adjusting to civilian life. He can’t concentrate at home when he has to hold his baby (which uncannily resembles a lifeless doll) and a BBQ turns into a nightmare when he almost beats a dog to death. Even in his PTSD he’s a complete asshole.

But then he discovers the joys of helping veterans. By talking to them, you say? Of course not. He helps them by shooting big guns at target ranges.

One of the most risible scenes is when Chris Kyle, who has now got his mojo back, sneaks up on his wife in full cowboy attire and draws a gun on her and makes out like he’s going to force himself on her. So sexy. You get it? The big, shiny six-shooter is his penis. Get it? Nevermind that he’s killed men, women and children with his rifle, isn’t it so sexy to fetishise guns?

The most jarring thing about the movie is how it ends. Kyle is happy and smiley and fully recovered and helping veterans and trying to pretend to rape his wife as a sexy cowboy when he gives a lift to a shifty looking fellow. A title then appears on the screen saying that the man murdered Chris Kyle. No attempt at all to depict this event or explain it. Our white hat just gets murdered.

And then you have the titles. Good Lord Almighty, you’d think that Oskar Schindler had died. American flags flutter and thousands of people line the streets to salute the paid murderer. It just goes to show that America is still deeply, painfully, worryingly and unabashedly in love with their frontier bullshit, their cowboy mythology and that most American of symbols: the gun.

Having been disappointed by 2014’s most critically acclaimed film, Boyhood, I decided to give 2014’s highest grossing movie a chance. Surely I can’t go wrong here. Everyone loves Guardians of the Galaxy. This is going to be loads of fun, isn’t it?

Sadly, I was wrong. This is a painfully ordinary movie. Pedestrian action scenes, plodding screenplay and mediocre direction. Starved as we are for fresh, inventive summer blockbusters, I can understand the willingness to pounce on anything that rises above the mediocre standards set by this rather moribund industry, but Guardians of the Galaxy is not a film to get excited about. It offers nothing that we haven’t seen before and nothing that hasn’t been done better countless times.

Want a sci-fi soap opera western? Watch Star Wars. Want a wisecracking hero? Watch Indiana Jones. Want a gang of colourful heroes? Watch The Great Escape or The Magnificent Seven.

What makes this extra disappointing is that the film starts so strongly. The film begins with Peter Quill as a child. His mother is on her deathbed and he’s listening to some 10cc on his Walkman. It’s incredibly sad and moving, and they manage to film it in such a way that it resembles a Spielberg film from the 70s. But then Peter gets kidnapped by aliens and we’re thrust into mediocrity.

The film is just incredibly disjointed and random. Like so many action and adventure films these days, they’re impatient. Everything has to move at a hundred miles an hour. They never take the time to set up situations and characters correctly. I watched Guardians and it was just like *random shit, random shit, wisecrack, random shit, random shit, action scene*. How about, you know, a story?

And really, the MacGuffin in this film is some round thing? And the bad guys are armour-plated aliens with blue faces? In The Avengers the MacGuffin was a square thing and the bad guys were amour-plated aliens with skeleton-like faces. Nice to see that Marvel is awash with fresh ideas. What’s next? Are we going to have a triangle MacGuffin and are the bad guys going to be amour-plated aliens with red skeleton faces? Yeah, that’s stupid, Captain America already has the red skeleton thing covered.

Maybe I’m just a joyless, miserable bastard. Everyone else also loved The Avengers, while I thought it was terrible. But no, I refuse to believe that I’m the problem here. Just because other people have lowered their standards beyond all recognition, doesn’t mean that I have to. How can you aspire to create a compelling adventure film when you have some of the dullest villains ever seen in a movie? A film like this lives and breathes with its villains. A hero is only as good as his/her adversary.

The villain here is a roided, blue alien dude. He doesn’t say anything interesting. He doesn’t say anything cool or scary. He doesn’t kill people in frightening/amusing ways. He doesn’t have any witty banter or one liners. He’s just like a guy from The Blue Man Group who’s gone seriously rogue and has taken far too much whey supplement. He probably has teeny, weeny testicles and is doomed to overcompensate on a cosmic scale.

The best character, by a country mile, is Groot. Who would have thought that Vin Diesel as an intergalactic Hodor would be the best thing about this blockbuster? But weirdly enough, Groot, the alien Hodor tree, is the most rounded, most human, most selfless character in the movie. He even gives his life for his friends. In one of the best scenes in the film, he wraps his friends in a cocoon to protect them, taking his own life in the process. It’s a great scene.

There’s also another great moment when Groot saves his friends by taking out a bunch of guys with his branches/arms. Groot drives his limbs through his adversaries and then batters them against the wall like rag dolls. Once they’re defeated, he turns around and gives his friends a big, goofy grin. It’s another excellent moment.

However, even with Groot the film has a touch of randomness about it. His powers are never truly explained and it’s only when he’s saving his friends with his cocoon that you’re told that this will kill him. Again it leaves you with the impression that things are being made up as they go along.

But there’s actually some pretty genuine pathos when Groot is killed and Rocket is sobbing into a handful of branches. For that, for having a character you genuinely care about, the film deserves some credit.

It gets nothing from me, though, for the fearsomely dull action sequences towards the end. We’re not quite in Avengers territory where you have a forty minute action scene with flying space turtles and millions of people dying bloodless deaths offscreen in a citywide rampage, but it’s almost as dreary. Really, these big space battles and citywide assaults haven’t excited me for a long, long time. Pixels get destroyed, stuff goes kaboom and everyone gets on with their lives. None of these big Marvel action sequences have any flavor. They all feel incredibly bland. I’d rather watch the crazy father versus son fight in Hulk than this. And that film is still a lot better than anything Marvel has produced since.