The early parts of Stop-Loss are its best, but even those are marred by the been-there-done-that quality of the footage of idle soldiers. The soldiers joke, they cuss, they drink and talk about sex. However, as with similar sequences in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, these scenes don’t amount to anything substantive. Director Kimberly Peirce changes up film speeds to give the footage of the soldiers a home-movie visual quality. Her decision to provide written titles for some of these short segments feels like a gimmick that might pay off, but the tactic is soon dropped, leaving viewers to wonder why it was employed in the first place.

The male bonding is a set-up for something more provocative that never ultimately arrives. What does work in the early stretch is a harrowing battle sequence that leads to multiple American and Iraqi deaths, as King and his men are lured into an ambush. The confusion and tension of those scenes suggests that Stop-Loss could have been a powerful war film, rather than the disjointed road movie set on the home front. A sequence at a veteran’s hospital is one of the few parts of the film’s second half that works, mainly because it shows, rather than tells, of the long road faced by veterans of the current conflict. In general, however, the film becomes much more conventional, even tiresome, as it drags toward its conclusion—a curiously overwrought family moment that doesn’t quite jell.

Despite its flaws, Stop-Loss has moments of power and is well performed—not enough to qualify it as a film worth seeing, but an indication that more successful movies about the Iraq War are within reach.

Questions? Comments? Contact the writer at crosswalkchristian@earthlink.net.

CAUTIONS:

• Language/Profanity:  Lord’s name taken in vain; much profanity; a crude reference to sexual intercourse, and sex-related jokes.
• Drugs/Alcohol:  Drinking; drunk driving; scenes set in a bar.
• Sex/Nudity:  Kissing.
• Violence:  Battle sequences with gunfire and grenades; images of dead women and children; badly wounded soldiers; struggles with post-traumatic stress; a street fight among several men, ending with gun shots.
• Religion:  A soldier gets baptized.