Stop-Loss - C-

A decorated sergeant (Ryan Phillippe) returns to Central Texas after his tour in Iraq. His last mission was a failure and several of his men died. This incident makes him want to leave the military and live the simple life. But when he is called back into duty via a clause in his contract, he sees this as a “back-door draft”. After punching out some military police, he goes on the lam with his best friend’s fiancée (Abbie Cornish). Meanwhile, his old friends and war buddies (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum) struggle at home as they prepare to go back to Iraq.
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The movie goes way out of its way to make Phillippe a hero. Of course he’s from Texas, because a story with an AWOL coward as the “hero” wouldn’t be as valid if he was from San Francisco. The worst Texas stereotypes are reproduced as only Hollywood jerks and Northeast liberals can. Phillippe tells his commanding officer (a pretty-good Timothy Olyphant) that he’s fulfilled his commitment to the army and not returning, but I’ve read lots of places this stop-loss “loophole” is hardly one at all – it’s stated explicitly in the contract that men and women sign when they go into the military that they may have their tours extended if there are an insufficient number of well-trained soldiers to take their place.

But setting the politics aside (somewhat impossible for a film as one-sided and politically motivated as this), the film just doesn’t work as a movie. The men drink a lot, make a lot of mistakes, and say stupid and nasty things to each other. Motivations of the characters aren’t well-explained and/or are senseless. The film seems to be heading toward a serious conflict at the Canadian border until it takes a hard right turn (or is it left?) and decides to sell out its own agenda. It’s the worst deus ex machina in recent memory in one of the most infuriatingly naïve and blatantly motivated films of the year. C-