Stop-Loss

Directed by Kimberly Peirce, starring Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Kimberly Peirce was the director who made the 1999 Oscar-winner Boys Don't Cry. This long-delayed follow-up, about traumatized troops back from Iraq, is completely pathetic: thoroughly feeble and softcore, with plenty of macho-sentimental male bonding and an insidious ending which made one suspect that Dick Cheney has been running screenwriting seminars.

Ryan Phillippe plays Brandon King, a patriotic Texan boy who volunteered for the army after 9/11 and fought bravely in the increasingly horrible war in Iraq; he returns to his hometown looking forward to an honorable retirement in civvy street.

But then the US Army invokes the little-known "stop loss" clause buried in his enlistment contract: They can and do order him to report for another tour of duty in Iraq. Brandon himself goes on the run from the military police; increasingly despairing, delusional and violent, he is faced with a terrible choice of abandoning his American identity and starting a new life in Mexico or Canada.

It sounds edgy, but it's actually about as subversive as Top Gun. Fundamentally incurious about the war itself, the film allows the 9/11-Iraq connection to pass unchallenged and issues relating to soldiers' trauma are finally simply abandoned. There's an unforgivably naive and tendentious scene showing a badly burned and mutilated soldier in hospital being radiantly cheerful and loyal about the whole situation. And that ending is very, very shaming indeed.

The Guardian