[DVD Review (R2)] STOP-LOSS
It’s been nine years and change since Kimberly Pierce blew me away with her debut movie, Boys Don’t Cry, a film I said the following about:
I friggin’ love this movie to death BUT… Kimberly Pierce’s flaw with this otherwise powerful film is that she aims for the sexual assaults and subsequent violence/murder to be stark and disturbing but, whilst ticking those boxes, they also fall a little close to being gratuitous and unnecessary. We’re not talking Eli Roth style violence and gore here but it’s a bit like Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer in some respects. Namely that it gets you to invest in the characters a little too well for the threat of violence (or in the case of this film, the actual violence) to sometimes feel anything less then real and as if it’s happening to you.
So you can imagine that I have been very excited to see what she would do next and where she would go. After many failed attempts at getting a variety of projects off the ground, Pierce has decided to pay respect to her enlisted brother and his fellow soldiers currently serving in Iraq with a film highlighting the sheer, bare-faced callousness of the US government’s policy of “stop-lossing” (i.e. pulling soldiers, as they head for ‘civvie street’ and a concluded army career, back in for further service in order to fill voids left by high-death rates and a lack of “draft”).
With a filmmaker as talented and as capable of being incendiary as Pierce, you’d expect a film that would sit quite comfortably with the likes of In The Valley Of Elah or maybe even The Kingdom. What you wouldn’t expect, even though the movies comes with the ‘MTV Productions’ opening card, the good looking but slightly vaccuous young cast and the US poster campaign, is that this is essentially Varsity Blues 2: Let’s Go Kill Some ‘Towelheads’ And Then Get Morose About It.
Once the well-shot opening “in the shit” battle sequence is over and done with, it took me a good forty odd minutes to shake the Varsity Blues comparisons. Texas setting. Overly good-looking cast. Earnest ‘acting’. MTV production values from, well, MTV Productions. You eventually do get to settle in though…
Decorated Iraq war hero Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe) makes a celebrated return to his small Texas hometown following his tour of duty. He tries to resume the life he left behind. Then, against Brandon’s will, the Army orders him back to duty in Iraq, which upends his world. The conflict tests everything he believes in: the bond of family, the loyalty of friendship, the limits of love and the value of honor.
The thing is though, Stop-Loss is just so goodamn overwrought. It’s a “message” movie in which the message isn’t there for us to find and discover for ourselves like in other masterful “War On Terror” movies like the majestic In The Valley Of Elah or the thinking-man’s action movie, The Kingdom. It is bludgeoned upon us at every conceivable moment. Every single minute of screen time, every line of dialogue, every plot development; it’s all there to tell us that the war is unjust and the US government are screwing over the troops that serve them.
The screenplay is over-written, and that’s putting it gently. Therefore, the cast – who range from excellent (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to the good (Abbie Cornish), right the way down to the reasonable/mediocre (Ryan Phillipe/Channing Tatum) – aren’t as well serviced as they could be. Phillipe has been building a steady stream of accomplished character work in the likes of Crash, Breach and Flags of our Fathers which have all done well to separate him from the tag “Reese Witherspoon’s Husband” or “A Smaller Paul Walker”. He goes back on himself here, with a role full of pouting, hands-on-hips and wooden line-delivery!
Then there’s THAT ending. You can see the cogs whirling on it, you can see what it is trying to do; it wants to be provocative, it wants to ignite your emotions and highlight the “futility” of trying to do the right thing and that only superseding to the government’s corruption will give you the life you deserve with the family you love. It just clunks. It just slams in there, lands and leaves you thinking “So, he’s went on this journey, only to end up doing the very thing he could have done with a bit of soul-searching outside of his Army barracks and saved us two hours?”
The opening moments suggest that a biting, satirical war movie through Pierce’s eyes would be one well-worthy of watching. But an overt “message movie”? If anyone was capable of subtly and finesse you would think it would be Kimberly Pierce, especially after Boys Don’t Cry. Which is what is so disappointing about Stop-Loss. She gets the point across she wants to get across but she does it in such a heavy-handed manner that she loses us along the way. Stop-Loss is a good movie. But it had such potential to be truly great.
Above: VARSITY BLUES poster
Above: STOP-LOSS poster
Popcorn Ratings ExplainedRelated Posts:
- [Movie Review] IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
- [DVD Review (R2)] THE LOOKOUT
- Movie Review: BREACH
- [Retro Review]: CRASH
- [Movie Review] TAKEN
2 Responses to “[DVD Review (R2)] STOP-LOSS”
You’re bang-on about Boys Don’t Cry. The sexual asaults at the end were just too much for me to take. I had to stop watching the movie.
Never saw this because I’ve had enough with Iraq war movies. ENOUGH. See my review of Redacted for proof.
You know what Kris, I understand your aversion. But this is the film to PUT A PERSON OFF those types of movies, most definitely. The message is so heavily hammered home!
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