As we turn the corner on five years of the Iraq war, can still no one make a war-homecoming drama both relevant and necessary? In the Valley of Elah pulled punches in the name of pleasing dispositions red and blue, Home of the Brave was equally toothless, the little-seen Badland was bad enough to be little seen, and Peirce's first film since 1999's Boys Don't Cry may just be the most epically uneven, politically schizophrenic, undeservedly sentimental misfire of them all.
Stop-Loss refers to the weaselly loophole instituted by the Bush administration that allows soldiers to be ordered back to Iraq after their assignment is completed. For proud U.S. Army sergeant Brandon King (Phillippe, boldly leading a solid ensemble) — who demonstrates why he's a decorated hero in the film's frontloaded balcony-rattler, a bloody firefight against insurgents in Tikrit — this backdoor draft is enough to question one's patriotism. Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard's setup promisingly draws a line in the sand, that this small-town Texas buck and his foolhardy war buddies are well-intentioned regular Joes following presidential orders, which makes King's vehement disagreement with being stop-lost a much richer dramatic conflict. But once the first act abandons its look at the compulsivity of soldier-made videos to follow through on this premise, mismatched war-flick clichés unfurl at an alarming rate, pulling the film in directions as unfocused, frustrating and meaningless as the war itself.
To help newcomers who haven't seen such landmarks of the genre as The Deer Hunter, or Coming Home, I'll demarcate what have become clichés with asterisks: King goes AWOL and on the run with his buddy's fiancée (Cornish), a peculiar dynamic that hints at but never congeals into romance. His conscience still haunted* by having killed an innocent* during the war, King suffers PTSD flashbacks* that influence him to beat up strangers,* and he's soon contemplating escape across the border at the expense of deserting his family, friends and country.* You can practically hear Peirce clearing her throat to say Big Important Things about the meaning of nationalism through singular soldier-experience dramas,* which include the yes-sir face of meathead pride* (Tatum), the war-scarred and potentially suicidal alcoholic* (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and the token minority with a poignant tale of woe* (Victor Rasuk).
The technical merits of Stop-Loss haven't been brought up because they're slickly serviceable (MTV Films is the production company, after all) but hardly artful enough to make mention, and also because a topic this weighty presented with an uncomfortably ambiguous, crowd-pleasing political stance takes precedence. What little anti-war critique Peirce presents — and she has it in her, which makes it all the more dubious — gets trampled over by jingoistic Rambo porn. The ending sequence, an infuriating cop-out feigning emotional hesitancy, quietly decrees that government detractors should suck it up and blindly obey rather than question controversial or flat-out immoral policies. USA! USA!
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