Watch the trailer for "Stop-Loss"
STOP-LOSS
You can’t help but have noticed that there have been no small number of films about the war in the past year or two. They are all well intended and do their best to demonstrate either generally that war is an awfully thing or specifically that the current one in Iraq has been atrociously bungled from day one. But they are largely failures for the reason that no one tends to see them other than people who already believe what they have to say: Anyone who might stand to learn something from such films has no intention of seeing any of them. (Which explains why so few of them have done any business at the box office.) To this list you can add Stop-Loss, though it may get a bigger audience than others of its ilk because it works so hard to seem like it’s not what it is. The title comes from a military loophole which says that, in time of war, a soldier can be kept in the service even when his expected term of service has ended. This is what happens to Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), a sergeant who returns home to Texas to a hero’s welcome. Though he’s awarded a bronze star, he blames himself for an incident in which several of his friends were killed. Unwilling to return to face more of the same, he goes AWOL, hoping to persuade the senator who appeared at his homecoming that he’s getting a raw deal. In the meantime, several of his Texas friends are facing their own problems: Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) deals with his post-traumatic stress with excessive drinking, while Steve (Channing Tatum) is unwilling to return to reality at all, much to his fiancee’s dismay.
Stop-Loss is the first film by Texas native Kimberly Peirce since her Oscar-winning
Boys Don’t Cry nearly a decade ago, and it shares that film’s ability to get under the skins of characters that might otherwise be written off as rednecks. But it tries so hard not to be a polemic that it fails to make much of an impact. It doesn’t help that Connecticut-born Phillippe and Australian actress Abbe Cornish have unpersuasive accents, abetted by too much dialogue that encourages them to sulk and pout. Worst of all, Peirce couldn’t come up with a satisfying ending, and while the film’s conclusion may be plausible, it’s dramatically weak.
—m. faust
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