The trailer for the soldiers-coming-home drama Home of the Brave opens "70 miles south of Baghdad," with a National Guardsman telling Dr. Sam Jackson that their unit will soon be shipped back to the States, which is about as good a movie omen as some fresh-faced kid showing his buddy a picture of his girl waiting at home. No — his pregnant girl. We cut to Jessica Biel, thankfully looking slightly more believable as a soldier than she did as an ace fighter pilot in Stealth, telling her kid via phone that she's coming home, and other soldiers, played by Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and Chad Michael "I'm Too Pretty To Die" Murray talking about what they'll do first when they get out. Gosh, what could go wrong?

Ah, One Last Mission. As a woman wails in the background in the vaguely atonal, Middle Eastern-ish sort of way that Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen have used to, well, cheesy effect, we learn that our very attractive gang of Guardsfolk will be making a humanitarian run outside protected areas. You know, even if I hadn't seen Black Hawk Down or read the features section of Esquire at any point in the last three years I think I'd know what's coming next.

Confusion. Stopped transports. Yelling. And then some kid pushes a button on his cell phone and all hell breaks loose. It kind of looks like the trailer editor hit the macro keys for "war carnage" on his Mac: bullets, fire, shoulder-mounted grenade launchers, someone screaming "NOOOOOO!!" before Sam Jackson's mournful voiceover and That-Lady-Still-Moaning come back to tell us that Bad Things Have Happened. All I want to know is, where is Chad Michael?!

With an aerial view of a military funeral, someone intones, "This is what all soldiers want; it means you fought hard." Biel comes down an escalator to be reunited with her son, and Sam Jackson's wife asks him what happened in that last mission as we see flashbacks to the battle — Biel wounded, explosions, a soldier dying in another soldier's arms.

Home of the Brave

And then Dave Matthews kicks in, and I am no longer taking this trailer seriously. "The Space Between," 2001's greatest ballad, heralds the realization that these soldiers are having a hard time readjusting to home — flashbacks to the battle, arguments with family members, and it looks like 50 Cent is holding up a White Castle. This, now, rushing toward the end, is the part where you're supposed to tear up a little, because pretty, pretty Chad Michael hasn't shown up for a minute and a half, and because Jessica Biel is hugging her moptop kid, and because Sam Jackson has that damp, stunned look in his eyes, but I'm having a hell of a time with all the enforced pathos.

A couple of great documentaries about the experience of soldiers in and returning from the Iraq war have come out in the past few months, notably Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes and Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth. These two minutes of prettied-up, dramatically scored, emotionally calibrated fiction just don't work for me — everything seems meticulously focus-grouped for maximum impact, and there's everything but a tattered American flag waving over that doomed convoy. Oh — no, wait, I see one.

I don't know who's going to want to see Home of the Brave; from this trailer it looks about as relevant to the Iraq conflict as an episode of Bridezillas. Maybe it's because it's from director Irwin Winkler (who I initially thought was Irvin Kershner, of The Empire Strikes Back fame, but alas), best known for producing the Rocky series and a bunch of Scorsese movies, who last directed the Cole Porter bio-musical De-Lovely, which I really dug, but which isn’t exactly a bona fide for making a great war movie. Maybe this isn't a war that can be fictionalized yet. I'm not sure what my objection to the material is, but I know my objection to the execution: frickin' Dave Matthews. About as emotionally sensitive as Coldplay's "Fix You" in the World Trade Center spots. Also, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH CHAD?!