| Pity the poor soldier returning from a hard tour of duty far from his home and loved ones. How does one re-adjust to civilian life after being deliberately stripped of all humanity by tough-love drill sergeants and taught how to kill other human beings in uncountable ways? How can one hug one's wife, girlfriend, mother, knowing that their buddies died in a pool of blood and shit, screaming in terror and agony? Even worse...what happens when the returning soldier, having served his term of duty to the Army and the United States government and aching to put his demons to rest and build a new life for himself and his family...is presented with paperwork stating that he's been "Stop-Lossed", i.e. called upon by the government to re-enlist for another tour of duty, simply because there aren't enough fresh soldiers being trained for combat readiness?
 That's the moral conundrum at the heart of director Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, a well-intentioned drama about Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), who finds himself the victim of a Stop-Loss order shortly after his triumphant return to his Texas hometown along with several other members of his platoon including Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Sergeant Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum). Brandon is at first bewildered at his new orders...then infuriated, taking his grievance to his commanding officer Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), who informs him that his impending return to Iraq comes down from the President himself. Brandon's blunt reply, "Fuck the President" earns him a stay in the brigade for insubordination, but Brandon sucker-punches the two MPs assigned to bring him in and goes AWOL. He'll be damned if he gets shipped back to Iraq, feeling he's paid his debt to his country several times over, and sets off to meet a sympathetic senator (Josef Sommer) in an attempt to fight what he feels to be a great injustice, with Steve's tough-as-nails girlfriend Michelle (the lovely Abby Cornish) agreeing to accompany him on a trip to Washington.
 This has the potential to be a gripping melodrama colored by ripped-from-the-headlines relevance to a current, seemingly never-ending conflict that deserves to be examined from every possible angle. So then why is Stop-Loss, well-crafted and performed as it is, such a relentlessly forgettable film? Oh, it's not bad in any truly memorable way, but following a glut of Iraq War dramas that were released to great fanfare in late 2007 only to be met with middling reviews and audience apathy, Stop-Loss plays like yesterday's headlines. At least Paul Haggis' In The Valley Of Elah, flawed as it was, had a great, heartrending turn by Tommy Lee Jones as an aggrieved father at its heart, which made the film work as drama divorced entirely from the critique of the real-life politics surrounding it. Compared to that film, Stop-Loss plays more like an R-rated afterschool special with better-than-average production values and performances.
 It doesn't help that the film collects war movie clichés like iron fillings to a magnet. A sequence where Phillippe and Cornish, on their way to Washington, have their car broken into, causing Phillippe to have a war flashback while kicking the crap out of the punks that swiped their stuff, is pure, hackneyed boilerplate, and the scene where they visit one of Phillipe's badly-wounded squad mates (Victor Rasuk) in the hospital is undercut by some distractingly poor horror-show makeup (I'm reminded of Tor Johnson in The Beast Of Yucca Flats, where, to quote Crow T. Robot, "they poured a bowl of Cream Of Wheat on his head and it hardened"). Even as compellingly talented a young actor as Joseph Gordon-Levitt can't completely warp his head around the ultra-clichéd role of the Destructive Drunken Soldier, sucking down brewskis and beating up civilians while generating little empathy for his poorly-conceived character.
So...Stop-Loss isn't bad enough to be really distracting, but it never distinguishes itself from countless other post-war films of its ilk. Nice try, everybody, but...it just doesn't work.
Presentation
It's a brand-new movie, so the film's 2:35.1 aspect ratio is presented with excellent clarity, Chris Menges' rich cinematography given an appropriately film-like quality with almost no print deficiencies. The sound (in English, French and Spanish 5.1 flavors) offers some thumping, low-end sonic fireworks in an early Iraq-set ambush sequence, and the remainder of the film's soundscape is presented with nice, speaker-filling fidelity. No complaints here.
 Extras
An audio commentary credited to director Kimberly Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard is something of a misnomer, as I doubt Richard says more than fifty words over the course of the film's near-two hour running time. Peirce takes the bulk of the track, and she delivers a fairly entertaining chat about the film's logistics and the real-life events that inspired it. It's a bit dry, but if you liked the movie more than I did, you might get something of value from it. There's also the obligatory Making Of (20:57) with more of the same from the cast and crew, a Boot Camp segment (10:02) with our soldier leads learning the ins and outs of combat training, roughly 18:33 of deleted scenes (with optional commentary by Peirce) that flesh out certain character details, but were wisely excised (even though some clips made it into the film's trailer), and a previews menu (10:20) with ads for American Teen, The Ruins, Star Trek, Iron Man (oh, excuse me, "Eye-Ron Man") and Shine A Light. The horrendous trailer for Stop-Loss itself is nowhere to be found ("Let The Bodies Hit The Floor"? Are you fucking kidding me?).
Bottom Line
The real-life situations brought up by Stop-Loss are sobering and well-worth dissecting, but this mediocre drama isn't the best vehicle for generating that kind of dialogue.
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