Military Movies - Military Times

Film Review: ‘Stop-Loss,’ 3 stars

As film fodder, the Iraq war and its effects on U.S. troops and their families has so far been quicksand for Hollywood.

A string of films — “Grace Is Gone,” “Rendition,” “Redacted,” “Lions for Lambs” and the unfairly snubbed “In the Valley of Elah” — have all gone down in flames at the box office.

It simply may be that with the war still raging — literally for the troops fighting it, figuratively for supporters and opponents back home — it’s just too soon to make sense of it; maybe that can only come with time.

The latest Iraq war movie, “Stop-Loss” will not go down as that conflict’s definitive film. But writer-director Kimberly Peirce gets as close as any filmmaker has so far to capturing the plight of the many young Iraq war veterans left largely on their own to grapple with their post-deployment demons.

The melodrama gets a little thick at times, but the overall result feels like the work of a filmmaker far more seasoned than Peirce, whose only other credit of note is “Boys Don’t Cry,” made nine years ago.

“Stop-Loss” blasts off with a harrowing battle scene. Staff Sgt. Brandon King (a superb Ryan Philippe) leads his squad into an alley in hot pursuit of a trio of insurgents. It’s an ambush; in the ensuing melee, several soldiers are killed, others badly wounded.

Then we come back home to see Brandon and his fellow soldier and boyhood buddy, Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), made the guests of honor in a welcome-home celebration in their small Texas town, where the jingoistic Steve fires up the crowd with a booming declaration about “fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them in Texas!”

Both Steve and Brandon are set on getting out. But they can’t shake the war so quickly. It isn’t long before Steve’s flashbacks have him digging foxholes on his front lawn at 3 a.m., much to the distress of his fiancée, Michelle (Aussie actress Abbie Cornish in a fine, understated performance).

Faring even worse is their squadmate Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is nothing but a ball of burning, unfocused, alcohol-fueled rage.

“What’s happened to these guys?” Michelle plaintively asks.

Brandon, a straight arrow who feels he did his duty as well as he could and now wants to get on with his life, seems to have a firmer grip — at least until he’s told, on the very day he’s due to separate, that he has been “stop-lossed” and is going back to Iraq.

The film says 81,000 troops have been stop-lossed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By now, everyone in uniform should know what that means. But just in case …

Every military enlistment incurs an eight-year obligation, even if you think you’re signing up only for, say, three. The military can keep you in for all eight if it chooses. Or it could let you out after your three — while retaining the legal right to yank you back for another dance any time in the next five years.

“It’s a back-door draft, is what it is,” Brandon sputters.

Feeling betrayed — and unable to bear losing more buddies in combat — Brandon makes a snap call to go AWOL, hatching a half-baked plan to go to Washington, along with Michelle, in the naïve hope that the backslapping senator who hailed him as a hero at his homecoming will get his stop-loss orders overturned.

The road trip and the stops along the way form the heart of the film. The journey leads Brandon to places he could not have imagined just a few weeks earlier, including a shadowy community of AWOL troops trying to go north to Canada.

But “Stop-Loss” is not an antiwar film; if anything, it’s pro-troops, epitomized by its long, wordless, moving final scene.

Peirce, whose younger brother served with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, simply wants us to think about the meaning of duty and patriotism against the backdrop of this most frustrating of wars — and she succeeds, poignantly and sympathetically.

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Rated R for strong violence, language.

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