Critic wrangle: “Stop-Loss.”

Nine years after Kimberly Peirce's first film "Boys Don't Cry" hit theaters, her follow-up, "Stop-Loss," opens, an unlikely MTV Films take on the Iraq War. (My review of the film from SXSW is here.) Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly suggests that Iraq-themed films are following the same arc as Vietnam-themed ones, which means that "Stop-Loss" serves "for today's audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did for audiences of the '70s." Too much so, for him: "[T]he film so effectively reconstitutes its own Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them." He deems the film "sincere without being especially memorable." Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly calls the film "heartfelt" while concluding that it "holds so much of its rage in check -- and keeps such a nervous eye on the attention span of its audience...

Nine years after Kimberly Peirce’s first film “Boys Don’t Cry” hit theaters, her follow-up, “Stop-Loss,” opens, an unlikely MTV Films take on the Iraq War. (My review of the film from SXSW is here.)

Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly suggests that Iraq-themed films are following the same arc as Vietnam-themed ones, which means that “Stop-Loss” serves “for today’s audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did for audiences of the ’70s.” Too much so, for him: “[T]he film so effectively reconstitutes its own Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them.” He deems the film “sincere without being especially memorable.” Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly calls the film “heartfelt” while concluding that it “holds so much of its rage in check — and keeps such a nervous eye on the attention span of its audience — that it ultimately strangles itself.” “This is a picture that takes a serious subject everyone in America should care about,” adds Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek, “and turns it into drama so aggressively mediocre that you’re forced to guilt yourself into caring about the characters in front of you. This is a movie about pain and suffering (both the emotional and physical kinds) that never lets its own guard down for a minute.”

A.O. Scott at the New York Times finds the film becomes “confused,” but that “this confusion can be seen as a measure of its honesty”: “It is an imperfect movie — marred, if anything, by its sincere affection and undisciplined compassion — about the imperfect young men who keep returning to a war the rest of us would prefer not to think about.” “This is still a fantasy,” writes Armond White at the New York Press. “Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.” Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club finds it couldn’t be much better: “Stop-Loss is a human story first and foremost, and Peirce and her stellar young cast ensure that the message never gets in the way of the storytelling.”

[Photo: "Stop-Loss," Paramount Pictures, 2008]