Nine long years after making her impressive feature debut with Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce returns to the big screen with a ham-fistedly topical sophomore effort that might just as well be called Soldiers Do Nothing But Whine. The nonstop bitchfest commences not long after three Army grunts—Brandon (Phillippe), Steve (Tatum), and Tommy (Gordon-Levitt)—are welcomed home as conquering heroes following the completion of their tour of duty in Iraq, where they saw enough carnage to make them permanently nauseated. Brandon, in particular, though ultra-patriotic and super-tough, wants nothing more to do with the military, having seen too many buddies turned into dog chow by IEDs. But too bad: Uncle Sam still wants him, and an obscure contractual sub-clause known as the “stop-loss” measure allows the Army to prolong his hitch indefinitely in time of war. Aghast to discover that he’s being shipped right back to the front line, Brandon impulsively decks an officer and goes AWOL, fleeing cross-country with his friend Steve’s pretty fiancée (Cornish) in tow.
Given her relative inexperience, Peirce does a remarkable job with the early Iraq-set material, creating a genuinely harrowing skirmish in which our boys are ambushed in a narrow alleyway by rooftop insurgents with rocket launchers. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie, which she co-wrote with Mark Richard, is a tedious morass of generic anti-war platitudes, served up with blind conviction but almost zero insight. Apart from one fleeting remark about how Brandon’s time in Iraq wasn’t remotely the “payback for 9/11” that he’d signed up for, the particulars of our current campaign seem irrelevant; war, according to Stop-Loss, is terrible primarily because it’s so damn stressful and, you know, dangerous. (Really?) Worse, the film simply takes it for granted that the stop-loss policy itself is unadulterated evil—never asking, for example, what happens in Iraq if experienced, decorated soldiers like Brandon are allowed to say, “No thanks, I’m all done.” Do we draft civilians who didn’t enlist to replace them? Do we forge ahead with insufficient manpower? Do we conclude that it’s time to get the hell out? Peirce apparently has no interest in such paltry matters. Our poor, traumatized boys want to go home, and from the blinkered, limited perspective of this movie, that’s really all that matters.
Stop-Loss
** 1/2
Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Rated R