"Stop Loss"-Movie Response

After ogling the online trailer for nearly five months, I finally went to a screening of "Stop Loss" last night. All atwitter knowing a bevy of beautiful, shirtless men were awaiting me, I felt like a kid in a candy store.

Sure, I care about the issues as much as the next girl but, come on, we all know the majority of ticket sales on opening weekend will come from people excited to watch the scrumptious Channing Tatum cry while being both tender and masculine or see Mr. Newly-Single-and-Ready-to-Mingle himself, Ryan Phillippe, strut around half naked caressing a shotgun. Let’s just call a spade a spade.

The film is Kimberly Peirce’s follow up to “Boys Don’t Cry” and it was ten years in the making. Her brother chose to enlist after 9-11 and was sent to Iraq. Upon his return he shared stories and videos (which are utilized and emulated in the movie) created during his tour and Peirce found the inspiration she’d be looking for.

“Stop Loss” follows a group of soldiers as they finish a tour in Iraq and return home, decorated and celebrated veterans, ready to return to life as civilians. Or so they think. Thanks to the demented mind of George W. Bush and his cronies, realizing there was no way to continue their idiotic siege on Iraq without exploiting even more innocent people, they created a back door draft known as the Stop Loss clause where any soldier can be sent back to battle if it is necessitated in wartime. But “Stop Loss” isn’t just about this egregious policy, it’s about the emotional ramifications war takes on the psyche of these young men, the fall out witnessed by the people who love them and the bonds between soldiers who fight and die side by side.

It has all the makings of something truly great…but it falls short.

Kimberly Peirce loves to create a world and then let it suffocate you. She did it with “Boys Don’t Cry”; she does it with “Stop Loss”. She never allows the audience to feel the emotional resonance of a situation because she lets her actors feel it for us. Worse yet, there are no layers, no subtlety. From the moment the film starts you’re driving toward a brick wall at 90 miles an hour and you just sit there waiting for the crash tensely. There was never a moment in “Boys Don’t Cry” when I wasn’t anticipating a horrific, violent murder. I understand that soldiers live in a constant state of PTSD inducing terror and adrenaline but this is a film and I want an emotional experience.

On more than one occasion I felt like I was watching a remake of “Varsity Blues” but take out football, insert Iraq and replace “I don’t want your life” with “This family is done fightin’ this war”. The truth is you can see the ghost of something remarkable. If you watch the trailer and compare it to the film, you’ll find plot points that would’ve helped shape the film immensely but have been amputated, leaving behind the itch of a phantom limb.

Luckily, Channing and Ryan are as stunning as you might hope and Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to define himself as The One to Watch, not just because he stunning and looks like a young Keanu Reeves but because this kid will continue acting for decades and deserves the roles Ryan Gosling gets.