In "Stop-Loss," writer-director Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") tells a story of Texas buddies who grew up together and shipped out together; now they're back home and a mess. The first 15 minutes of the film are set in Iraq and shot, as is the fashion, with a shaky, you- are-there digital camera. We see a checkpoint incident lead inexorably to a back-alley ambush - order devolving into chaos - and the worst part is that the scene feels all too familiar by now.
Then, almost magically, we're back in small-town America, with the locals asking the returning soldier boys, "Hey, we winning this thing?" Says Sergeant Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) "We're killin' 'em in Iraq so we won't have to kill 'em in Texas!", but the truth is he's brought the enemy back with him. Shriver gets so drunk his first night home he's scared to go inside; he just digs a foxhole in the front yard and goes to sleep.
He's still a pillar of strength next to Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the kind of twitchy psycho veteran the movies have been mining since the first wave of Vietnam films. The third main character is squad leader Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), like Shriver a former high school football god turned mortal.
Brandon is holding it together, more or less, until he learns the US Army intends to forcibly re-enlist him using the backdoor loophole known as "stop-loss." "With all due respect, sir, [expletive] the president," he tells his startled commanding officer (Timothy Olyphant). Then he goes AWOL.
The problems with the film are twofold. First, Peirce wants to pile every calamity afflicting Iraq War veterans onto her narrative. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, PTSD, night terrors, suicidal behavior, prosthetic limbs - what starts as drama becomes unrelieved litany.
