Stop-Loss

Critics are suggesting that Stop-Loss, from Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce, is unlike any antiwar film ever produced, certainly unlike any about the Iraq or Afghan wars. A.O. Scott in the New York Times offers an almost tortured description of the movie. It is, he writes, "not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions. The sober, mournful piety that has characterized a lot of the other fictional features about Iraq ... is almost entirely missing from Stop-Loss. ... Not that the movie is unsentimental -- far from it -- but its messy, chaotic welter of feeling has a tang of authenticity. Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage." Likewise Jan Stewart in Newsday writes that the movie "builds a cumulative power and sense of urgency that can't be denied." Much of the credit for the film's success is being attributed to the performance of Ryan Philippe, in the role of a soldier who resists orders to return to the Middle East. Philippe plays his character, says Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, "not as a flawed hero but as a man with real and serious psychological problems trying to survive in a world of moral collapse." John Anderson in the Washington Post agrees: "Phillippe does a fine job translating the unspeakable anger of a soldier into action, expressing it physically instead of verbally," he writes. On the other hand, Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle comments that the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq "deserve a better movie" and faults Philippe for being unable "to broadcast inner torment. Oh, he'll yell when he needs to, he'll wince on cue ... but that roiling substratum of psychological pain just refuses to surface." And Kyle Smith, the lone, outspoken political conservative among the country's major newspaper critics, takes dead aim at the movie, calling it facetiously, "a highly patriotic film, if you happen to dream of the restored caliphate as you sleep in your Osama bin Laden pajamas. Its message is that the good guys are U.S. soldiers who decide to desert."