Kimberly Peirce made her directorial debut in 1999 with Boys Don’t Cry, the tragic story of a transsexual who’s murdered in small-town America. Nine years later, she’s finally back with a follow-up and, unfortunately, the wait wasn’t worth it. Stop-Loss is a MTV-produced look at the conflict in Iraq and at how a little-known clause in soldiers’ contracts that allows for what politicians like to call a “backdoor draft” affects returning vets’ lives. Ryan Phillippe stars as Sgt. Brandon King, a decorated war hero even though he’d tell you he was only ever doing his job as a squad leader. After returning home to Texas from a grueling tour in Iraq, he’s anxious to wrap up his discharge. He’s done his duty, and it’s time to get back to civilian life, in other words, a life that doesn’t involve militia soldiers using innocent women and children as cover. Unfortunately, President Bush has other plans for him.

“Stop-loss” refers to the suspension of military service contracts in order to prevent detrimental loss of troop strength during a time of war, except, of course, we never declared war on Iraq –- a point Brandon makes before he goes AWOL with the intention of reaching a sympathetic senator. With him he takes the fiancée of his best friend and fellow soldier, Steve (Channing Tatum). Michelle (Abbie Cornish) thinks she is just protecting a childhood friend when she agrees to drive Brandon to Washington, even though Steve doesn’t see it that way. In his eyes, Brandon has turned his back on his military brethren, for all intents and purposes his real flesh and blood.

What Steve and many of the soldiers in their unit aren’t yet ready to admit, though, is that they’re all suffering from various degrees of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Steve digs a sleeping hole in his front yard while drunk; Isaac (Rob Brown) obsessively edits war footage to testosterone-oozing music; and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is picking fights with every hillbilly around and has driven his wife to leave him. Long story short: the Iraq “War” has really f'ed up the soldiers fighting it, and the US government has dropped the ball in caring for them upon their return, even going so far as to betray them by sending them back to the front after they’ve served their country admirably.

When Washington predictably turns its back on Brandon, he believes he has no choice left but to flee the country to Canada and create a new identity. This isn’t the America he signed up to protect. Peirce makes you sympathize with the soldier’s plight, but too often relies on familiar (but yes, realistic) tropes to tell his story. Except for the battle sequences in Iraq, which are shot with a visceral explosiveness that recollects the independent spirit and voice that gave us Boys Don’t Cry, most of Stop-Loss looks and feels too slick, polished, and even contrived to illicit the base disgust the reality of the stop-loss policy should get from the audience.

I’d like to think this is MTV’s influence on the project, pushing for something more superficial and easy to digest, but who knows?

Grade: C+

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