Movie Review - 'Stop-Loss'

Stop-Loss

Starring Ryan Philippe, Channing Tatum, and Abbie Cornish
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Rated R

If there is an indictment in Kimberly Peirce’s emotional new film, Stop-Loss, it is not that our current wars are invalid or that the time to pull out has been with us for a while. Rather, what is under the microscope are the policies that allow any young man or woman the chance to fight for their country, specifically how those policies have been corrupted to the point that once any young man or woman begins to fight they might not get the chance to stop.

Setting her film in a small town in Texas, where every resident seems to know all the soldiers, Peirce aims to make Stop-Loss more universal and relatable. When his unit returns from Iraq with one casualty, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) believes he has served his time. Some of his friends are no longer themselves following their enlistment, either disenfranchised with the world they had left behind or no longer innocent having seen and done things they never want to revisit.

But when Brandon learns that despite his contract with the military, he will be forced to return to combat, he is defiant, going AWOL then traveling across the country with the girlfriend of one of his fellow soldiers (Abbie Cornish) in an effort to meet with his Congressman to challenge the Army’s dictate.

Stop-loss is the term assigned to the military policy of involuntary extension of a soldier’s service beyond their original contract. According to the film, it has already happened to 68,000 troops in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so it is patently an important and timely issue that Peirce is brave to tackle. Of course, bravery is nothing new to Kimberly Peirce as a filmmaker; her previous effort, Boys Don’t Cry won Hilary Swank an Oscar and was less a biography than it was a frank discussion of sexual reassignment and bigotry.

Stop-Loss is not as powerful or as focused as Boys Don’t Cry and there’s a sense that perhaps this film begins to spin more hyperbole than it needs to once Brandon begins his road trip for truth. The topic is not a common one and while it is necessary for Peirce to approach it on a small scale, through the eyes of just a few affected soldiers, Stop-Loss takes some wrong turns along the way.

There is no argument with the performances, however. There’s immediacy and honesty in the suffering portrayals by Phillippe, Cornish, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt that drive home the point of Stop-Loss more than the script is able to.