Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I’m still working on my review for this one, and I’ll post it later tonight. For now, Capone, you’ve beaten me. But we will fight again. Oh, yes, we will.

It's taken writer-director Kimberly Pierce nearly 10 years to make her follow up to the extraordinary BOYS DON'T CRY, and she, as many have before her in the last couple of years, has chosen the subject of the war in Iraq as her backdrop. She has assembled a fantastic cast of actors to tell her angry story of the government and military's policy to keep soldiers enlisted well beyond the year or so they signed up for. But STOP LOSS isn't really about the stop-loss loophole; it's about the psychological changes that go on inside a soldier's head when he returns home. It's about relationships torn apart because soldiers aren't eased back into comparatively quiet and uneventful lives after spending months on end thinking they could die at any moment. On that level, the film succeeds thanks to superb performances by the likes of Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum as soldiers returning home to Texas who the military are trying to pull back in.

Phillippe's character decides to run away rather than fight again. Abbie Cornish plays the girlfriend of one of his buddies (thankfully Pierce avoids any romantic entanglements) who travels with Phillippe to D.C., where he believes he can get in touch with a Congressman to sort out this problem. STOP LOSS also features strong performances from Ciaran Hinds and Linda Emond as Phillippe's parents, and Timothy Olyphant as his commanding officer. But there's something lacking and perhaps a bit predictable about STOP LOSS. Maybe part of it is just bad timing. Pierce's film comes after a year of one film about war in the Middle East after another. Each one has presented its story in different and sometimes trivial ways, but the subject of what exists for returning soldiers was covered to perfection in Paul Haggis' IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, so this film seems to only skim the issue's surface. Some of the battle scenes at the beginning of the movie are pretty intense and certainly help explain the mental state of the soldiers, but it doesn't seem like enough.

Pierce seems to fall back on army speak and tried-and-true war-movie dialog to tell her story, and I know she's a better filmmaker than that. To prove that, Pierce doesn't give us easy solutions to the stop-loss situation, and most of the characters aren't better people or better off at the end of the film; a few are much worse off, in fact. But these nice touches aren't enough to place STOP LOSS in the pantheon of great films about war or the cost of it. Phillippe, Tatum and Levitt give fiercely strong and believable performances, and thankfully their acting elevates this wholly average production. But the film is a near miss in my book.

Capone