Stop-Loss introduces the heroes of the story while they are still in Iraq. The audience goes along with the soldiers as they engage in an impromptu firefight in a bomb-and-bullet bruised alley with nameless, motivationless, Iraqi "insurgents". Peirce captures all of this with the sort of gritty, handheld camerawork Paul Greengrass used so well in his Bourne films (and Ridley Scott used so poorly in Black Hawk Down). It's cinematic claustrophobia, and it works. The audience is there, so to speak, with the soldiers who fight and get shot and bombed. Some get out alive. Others are carried away, dead. And a few make it out somewhere between life and death, maimed and deformed. For one soldier, Rico Rodriguez (the amazing Victor Rasuk), the maiming is physical. But for another, Ryan Phillippe's Brandon King, he leaves the battle mentally and emotionally deformed.

The alley shoot out is a bravura passage of cinematic filmmaking, the anxiety and excitement palpable and harrowing. Throughout the early scenes there are moments of the young soldiers goofing off and roughhousing that clearly define their characters and their situations in exciting and interesting ways. And this is precisely why the film disappoints in such a pronounced way over the course of the picture. When the soldiers return home, when the actual movie narrative starts, Peirce's strengths and weaknesses as a director reveal themselves with little mercy - for either her or her audience.

There is no denying Peirce's facility with actors. She assembled a fantastic cast for this picture. Ryan Phillipe, who has always walked a fine line between "real" actor and mere marquee face, comes into his own in a miraculous way. I walked out feeling similar to how I felt after seeing Catch Me If You Can, realizing DiCaprio had become that rare thing: a movie star who is also an actor. Channing Tatum as Steve is also an electric presence on screen, and if one can forgive him for his always-wavering Texas accent, he gives the film a brawny and brazen energy that dominates the screen. The scenes these two actors share are powerful and moving, but more often than not, troubling...which brings us to Peirce's weakness: plotting and storytelling.

The film is so sloppily organized as a narrative that it sabotages itself at every turn. It is a road movie that goes nowhere, a movie about would-be veterans who never quite exit the Army, a film that ends up being about nothing because it is trying to be about too many things. To give Peirce the benefit of the doubt, one might allow that this ambiguity is an intentional choice. However, I don't think it is. What is more likely is that Peirce really had a hard time defining the film in her head beforehand.

Stop-Loss is essentially a classic melodrama, at least it should be. But Peirce sells that noble genre short by taking our protagonist away from his friends and family (the very relationships most ripe for emotional excavation), and puts him out on the road. When Brandon is informed that even though he is supposed to be out-processing and returning to civilian life, he is, in fact, being sent back to Iraq, he loses his shit. Brandon gets this cockamamie idea that he's going to drive to Washington D.C. to seek the help of a politician who recently shook his hand at a homecoming parade. He goes AWOL, and so does much of the picture's logic.

Posted in Moviegasm by Damien Belliveau at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Last Comment: Memememe on Apr 1, 2008 08:43 PM.