CLOSE 'American Sniper' topped the U.S. box office with takings of $90 million, a record for a January opening. The film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper as Navy Seal Chris Kyle, performed twice as well as studio estimates. VPC 
 
 "American Sniper," with Kyle Gallner, left, and Bradley Cooper, was No. 1 at the weekend box office. (Photo: Warner Bros.) 
 
 Clint Eastwood's American Sniper ignited the holiday weekend box office, leaving January records behind as it made a stunning $90.2 million in three days. 
 
 The total easily topped the previous January high, James Cameron's Avatar at $68 million in 2010. Warner Bros. estimates that American Sniper will make $105 million over the four-day Martin Luther King weekend, which would be another record. 
 
 CLOSE "American Sniper" tells the story of U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle who the military credits with the most confirmed kills of any marksman in American history. Starring Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. Directed by Clint Eastwood. VPC 
 
 "This is staggering. It's blockbuster numbers in January, the sort of numbers usually reserved for summer films and superhero movies," says Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst for Rentrak. "No one saw this coming. The film has been building an audience and blasting any projections all weekend." 
 
 The $105 million tally is more than double what analysts were expecting, Dergarabedian says. It marks director Eastwood's biggest debut, surpassing Gran Torino, which earned $29.5 million in 2008. American Sniper topped that with Friday's $30.5 million opening. The estimated IMAX total on 332 screens for the four-day weekend is $11.5 million (yet another record). 
 
 American Sniper, with Bradley Cooper starring as Navy SEAL sharpshooter Chris Kyle, initially opened in December to packed theaters in limited release — making nearly $3.4 million on a handful of screens in Los Angeles, New York and Dallas. It got a boost from Thursday's Oscar nominations, receiving six, including best picture and Cooper for best actor. 
 
 The film has maintained a coveted A-plus CinemaScore with audiences throughout its release. 
 
 CLOSE Doug Harris played by Josh Gad is a lovable but socially awkward groom-to-be with a problem: he has no best man, so he turns to a best-man-for-hire to help him out. VPC 
 
 Josh Gad and Kevin Hart's The Wedding Ringer took second place with $21 million for the three-day weekend (an estimated $25 million for four days). The raunchy R-rated comedy is the fourth Hart film in a row to open with more than $20 million. 
 
 The comedy overcame a 33% critical approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com and scored 79% approval with audiences. 
 
 CLOSE A young bear named Paddington makes his way to England in search of a new home, the family that takes him in begins to treat him as one of their own. VPC 
 
 Live-action family film Paddington took third place with $19.3 million ($24 million projected for the holiday weekend). The film, based on the beloved bear star of the children's books, scored well with critics (98% approval on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (87%) alike. 
 
 
 
 
 
 CLOSE Ex-covert operative Bryan Mills played by Liam Neeson and his ex-wife, Lenore, are enjoying a reconciliation when Lenore is brutally murdered in 'Taken 3.' Neeson is framed for the crime and flees, with the CIA, FBI and police all in hot pursuit. VPC 
 
 Liam Neeson's Taken 3 fell to fourth after winning the box office last weekend. The film earned $14 million for three days and an expected $16.4 million for the long weekend. 
 
 Appropriately, director Ava DuVernay's Selma rounded out the top five films with $8.3 million for the three-day weekend, and an estimated $10.3 million for the full MLK holiday. 
 
 If estimates hold up, this will be a record Martin Luther King weekend, with $240 million total through Monday, propelled by Sniper. That would beat 2009's record MLK weekend of $231.5 million for the four days when Paul Blart: Mall Cop made its debut. 
 
 
 
 
 
 CLOSE USA Today Movie Critic Claudia Puig discusses "Blackhat" and tell you whether to "Catch It," "Rent It," or "Skip It" in this week's edition of The Screening Room. 
 
 Perhaps the weekend's only disappointment was the debut of the Chris Hemsworth-starring Blackhat, which earned $4 million for the weekend ($4.6 million for the four-day). The hacker film directed by Michael Mann scored a C-minus with audiences on CinemaScore. 
 
 Final numbers are expected Tuesday. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Bo8Gox ||||| Former Navy Seals Sniper Chris Kyle, is pictured in this handout photo from Harper Collins. Kyle, the former U.S. Navy SEAL sniper who was responsible for 160 kills during his career as U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, was shot and killed with another man at a gun range on February 2,... 
 
 The cover of American Sniper, written by Navy Seals Sniper Chris Kyle, is pictured in this handout photo from Harper Collins. Kyle, the former U.S. Navy SEAL sniper who was responsible for 160 kills during his career as U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, was shot and killed with another... 
 
 Eddie Ray Routh is pictured in this booking photo provided by the Erath County Sheriff’s Office. Routh is a suspect in the shooting and killing of former Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle. 
 
 The man accused of gunning down former U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, a prominent military sniper, and a second man at a Texas shooting range has been arraigned on two counts of capital murder, the Texas Department of Public Safety said on Sunday. 
 
 Eddie Ray Routh, 25, was accused of killing Kyle, 38, and Chad Littlefield, 35, a neighbor of Kyle, on Saturday afternoon at the Rough Creek Lodge, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, the department said. 
 
 "They were shot at close range," said department spokesman Sergeant Lonny Haschel said. 
 
 Kyle, considered one of America's deadliest snipers after killing 160 people during his career as U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, wrote the book "American Sniper" about his military service from 1999 to 2009. 
 
 Routh, described in local media reports as a former Marine who suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), was arrested at his Lancaster, Texas home several hours after the shooting, having led police on a chase in his pickup truck. 
 
 "He was taken into custody after a brief pursuit," Haschel said. 
 
 According to a posting on a website run by members of the Special Operations Forces community, Kyle had been volunteering his time to help Marine Corps veterans suffering from PTSD and mentoring them. 
 
 "Part of this process involved taking these veterans to the range," said the posting on SOFREP.com. 
 
 WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth reported that the two men had taken Routh to the shooting range for the day to help him deal with his PTSD. 
 
 Routh was arraigned at the Lancaster municipal jail on Saturday on two counts of capital murder, a spokesman for the department of public safety said. The Erath County Sheriff's Office planned a news conference later on Sunday. 
 
 "It just comes as a shock and it's staggering to think that after all Chris has been through, that this is how he meets his end, because there are so many ways he could have been killed" in Iraq, Scott McEwen, who wrote the book with Kyle, told Reuters. 
 
 Kyle served four combat tours of duty in Iraq and elsewhere, and he won two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars for bravery, according to his book. 
 
 After leaving the Navy, Kyle founded Craft International, a firm that provided combat and weapons training to military, police, corporate and civilian clients. 
 
 Kyle is the co-author of another book coming out in May titled "American Gun - A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms." 
 
 In the wake of the slayings of 20 children and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut in December, Kyle was interviewed in January about rising calls for curbing U.S. gun violence. He told the website guns.com he favored arming teachers who have been screened and trained and spoke against restrictions on gun owners. 
 
 (Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Will Dunham) ||||| “American Sniper” may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it. 
 
 Glory is for civilians, politicians, patriots, home-front blowhards. Glory is the reason supplied by those who weren’t there, when those who were there know too much, have seen and done too much, to put it into platitudes. The movie is about Chris Kyle, the late Navy SEAL and military marksman, whose 160 confirmed enemy kills (out of a probable 255) over four tours in Iraq remains a record, for those keeping score. As played stolidly and inwardly by Bradley Cooper, he is a hero to everyone except himself. He’ll say he was just doing his duty in that tight, polite Texas drawl, but his eyes reveal the immensity of damage he has done to others and to himself. 
 
 “American Sniper” isn’t a war film or an antiwar film, then, and yet it’s both those things. It’s nonpartisan but not so naive as to be apolitical. Mostly, it’s a soldier’s story, as honest as its director can make it. That that director is Clint Eastwood may cause some to expect mindless jingoism or a true-blue salute, depending on which way they lean. But Eastwood the filmmaker has always been a more complicated figure than Eastwood the public persona, and his best work — with which this movie belongs — is scaldingly bleak about what human beings can do to each other. In films like “Unforgiven,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” “Letters From Iwo Jima,” and “Million Dollar Baby,” he has insisted that violence is an inescapable aspect of our existence and that it exacts lasting costs in dignity, self-worth, and emotional connection. There is very little self-satisfied mayhem in Clint’s universe — very rarely does the beast not bite us back. 
 
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 The movie is adapted from Kyle’s 2012 autobiography of the same name and follows his Texas youth, early rodeo days, and courtship and marriage to Taya (Sienna Miller). Accurately or not — there have been debates — he’s presented as a better-than-average good ol’ boy, lacking in the entitlement and self-aggrandizement of the stereotype, and he signs up for the SEALs in the straightforward belief that America needs to be protected from its enemies. The movie is explicitly about that belief being tested for its strengths and weaknesses. 
 
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 His first kills in country — his first “bad guys” — are a grenade-bearing little boy and his mother (not credited, unfortunately), and immediately Kyle’s far in over his head. You can see in his face that whatever comes after, he’ll never forgive himself for this. Cooper drops the hi-de-ho ebullience of “Silver Linings Playbook” and the “Hangover” movies and buries his reactions beneath his character’s bulk — the muscles Kyle builds up and the beard he grows in a futile bid to hide from himself. Employed as an “overhead” on rooftops to protect squads of Marines going door to door in Fallujah, his unerring marksmanship leads to him being regarded with awe as “The Legend,” and every time another soldier calls him that, Kyle looks away with equal parts modesty and shame. 
 
 While “American Sniper” is told from the viewpoint of the American military, it’s clear-eyed about the wreckage our presence leaves in its wake. An Iraqi patriarch (Navid Negahban) offers to lead US personnel (for cash) to an Al Qaeda enforcer called the Butcher (Mido Hamada), and Kyle assures the safety of the man and his children. It does not end well; in a later Stateside scene in which Kyle flips out over his newborn daughter’s cries, it’s a good bet whose wails he’s hearing. The film’s sympathies are with the grunts, but as a portrait of bureaucratic mismanagement and tactical overkill, the movie stings more than it soothes. Every so often, we seem to see the US troops, encased in high-tech hardware and adorned with death’s-head insignias, the way Iraqis may have seen them: as the stormtroopers from “Star Wars.” 
 
 Eastwood’s hardly making a screed here, but “American Sniper” has been read in certain quarters — by some who’ve seen the movie and some who haven’t — as an apologia for the Iraq war, and that is a serious misapprehension. The film is, simply, a tragedy in which American certainty comes to grief against the rocks of the real world, and it views its central figure as a decent man doing indecent things for what he keeps telling himself is a greater good. As the years pass, people around Kyle start coming undone: his wife — Miller is very touching as a woman who is both wiser and weaker than her husband — his little brother in the Marines (Keir O’Donnell), fellow SEAL Marc Lee (Luke Grimes). When the latter is killed in action, his mother (Pamela Denise Weaver) reads from a letter, written by the real Marc Lee, that asks, in part, “When does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade?” 
 
 Kyle’s response to that in the film is to insist that the letter — the doubt it contains — is what killed his buddy. Cooper’s body language, tense and miserable, says otherwise. There will be moviegoers who want more of a statement, but Eastwood doesn’t do that. He’s more interested in individuals than movements, and he knows he can convey his nuances through filmmaking. The man is 84, and I don’t know that he has directed a sequence as brilliant and as damning as the sandstorm that engulfs Kyle and his comrades at the climax of “American Sniper,” a brown-out that has to be read as a metaphor for a righteousness that has lost its way. 
 
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 There are missteps, one of them critical. Factual or not, the presence of an equally skilled enemy marksman named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) allows the director to gin up suspense with touches of Hollywood-style staging that feel false; on the other hand, the story line illustrates Kyle’s growing pursuit of vengeance over his stated patriotic motives and the safety of his men. And there’s no denying that Eastwood botches the ending of this story, in part because life itself botched it well into the film’s production. What rescues this killer from himself, ultimately, is saving fellow veterans, but there are those who can’t be saved, and while Eastwood is willing to glance in that direction, he doesn’t quite have the courage to go all the way into the dark. 
 
 The director might say the event in question was too close, personally and chronologically, but there was a chance to be taken and he missed it, and in its very final moments, “American Sniper” settles for the simpler heroism that too many of us crave. None of that erases the scourging sadness of all that has preceded it in this great and terrible film. 
 
 More coverage: 
 
 • In ‘American Sniper,’ Sienna Miller plays an American wife 
 
 • The truth about movies based on true stories 
 
 • More movie reviews from Ty Burr 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @tyburr
– Chris Kyle's book calls him the US military's deadliest sniper—but is he the world's? Not according to a British report that credits a Royal Navy sharpshooter with tallying the most kills, the Sun reports via the Telegraph. Unnamed sources say the British corporal is still serving and has 173 confirmed kills, most of them during Britain's deployment in Helmut province in 2006 and 2007. He is said to have killed 90 enemies in a single day. Kyle, whose story is told in the film American Sniper, officially had 160 kills but guessed his true total was about 250. British armed forces refuse to name their guy for fear of revenge attacks. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter says American Sniper banked a stunning $30.7 million this weekend, nearly breaking a Super Bowl-weekend record.