BEFORE: I took a skip day yesterday so this one would like up with the holiday - it's fine, I've sort of learned to build extras day into the schedule in case I get busy or I notice it's some actor's birthday the next day, and then I don't have to panic and double up. I've got a clear path to Father's Day - hell, I've got a clear path to mid-August - so I've got no worries.
Well, except one, for a lot of the scheduled films I got my cast lists from Wikipedia, not the IMDB. I really should go through everything on my list and cross-reference, but with about 550 films that I'm tracking, that's going to take some time. I did it for my romance films and for my horror films already, because I didn't want to miss any potential connections, but now I've got to do that for the main list, too - because Wiki had a bunch of actors listed as appearing in today's film that were NOT listed on IMDB - because they weren't in the film. I don't know why someone edited this film's cast list to say that Jason Patric, Melina Kanakaredes and Sadie Sink are in this film, because, well, they're just not. Now I have to edit the Wiki page, in addition to everything else I'm doing. The tasks never sort of end, do they?
Timothy Olyphant carries over from "Havoc" (2025). Thank God I stuck to the top-listed stars when I made my connections, if I had used someone who I thought had a cameo here I would have had to re-work my linking, but the problem has now been corrected and the chain remains unbroken. But I have to stay on my toes, if I'm relying on a connection based on archive footage in a documentary, then I may have to re-arrange the Doc Block on the fly.
THE PLOT: A veteran soldier returns from his completed tour of duty in Iraq, only to find his life turned upside down when he is arbitrarily ordered to return to field duty.
AFTER: Maybe this film would have been a better fit for Veterans Day, not Memorial Day, but the linking puts it where it puts it. Anyway, there is a small-town parade seen in the film and at least one military funeral, so I'm going to roll with that, and say I probably can't get a more appropriate film to watch today.
I kind of wish this film had explained the term "Stop-Loss" right out of the gate, it would have made things easier. The characters here all used it as a verb, as in "I got stop-lossed", if they could have said "the stop-loss clause" or "the stop-loss initiative" things might been clearer, but I guess either way we all had to infer what it means. It's apparently army jargon for coming to an end of a soldier's period of service, and then re-enlisting them for another tour without their consent. The main character here has been expecting to go home once he completes his tour of duty in Iraq, however the army decides for him that he needs to serve more time, because the country is at war, while at the same time the President is declaring victory in Iraq, and an end of the war. So it's something of an oxymoronic state, with the U.S. both not at war on paper, but at war in terms of having troops on the ground, battling insurgents. According to the graphic at the end of the film, this happened to about 81,000 soldiers serving in Iraq.
Somehow there wasn't enough time to train replacement troops, or recruit new soldiers, so they just told the serving ones to stick around a bit longer. Look, I get it, if you agree to do a job for a specific contracted period of time, if that job is in an office or a factory or a florist shop, you might be happy that your boss likes your work and wants you to stick around longer, maybe you even get a raise. But if your job is a soldier in the army and you could die while doing your job, well, that's a whole other story. Right?
The two main characters here are Brandon King and Steve Shriver, serving in the same unit, and both from Brazos, Texas. Their town hosts their whole unit while they're on leave, hence the parade and the picnic and all that - and Shriver is the screw-up for the first part of the film, he gets too drunk and digs a foxhole in his front yard, which freaks out his girlfriend. She calls Brandon and another soldier, Tommy, over to talk him down. But instead they put him in the car's trunk and go to the woods to shoot up Tommy's wedding presents. Yeah, it seems to be a rought thing, being married to a soldier - even if your man doesn't die in battle, when he comes home he's likely to have PTSD and therefore more liable to get drunk and/or beat up his wife or girlfriend.
When Brandon learns that he's not going to be released by the army as planned, he goes a little crazy, punches out an MP and drives off in Steve's car. He can only hide out at his parents' house for so long before the army finds him there, so he and Steve's girlfriend, Michelle, decide to drive to Washington DC to see if their state senator can help him out. But they only get as far as Tennessee before their car is broken into and their belongings are stolen. Brandon finds the three robbers and goes all Jason Statham on them, but suffers a head injury in the process. While at the motel in Tennessee, though, Brandon learns from another soldier on the run that there's a lawyer in New York who might be representing other soldiers who have been stop-lossed. (A previous visit to a dead soldier's family in Tennessee suggested there might be an underground group of such soldiers hanging around.)
Steve shows up to try to convince Brandon to come back to the base, he's smoothed things over with their Lt. Colonel, Boot Miller, who's agree to drop any charges if Brandon gets back in the next couple of days - meaning the two characters have switched places, Steve is now the "responsible" one, and Brandon's the screw-up. Brandon would rather head for New York to see if that lawyer can help him get across the Canadian border, however then he'd never be able to return to see his family in Texas again. And then just after paying the lawyer $500, half of the fee to smuggle him out of the country, Steve gets a phone call that Tommy, their friend and fellow soldier, has found a different way to avoid being sent back to Iraq, only it's not a happy one.
Brandon and Michele also visit Pvt. Rodriguez in the hospital, this is another soldier from their unit who survived the ambush in the streets of Iraq, however he's now blind and missing an arm and a leg - so really, this film's got it all - dead soldiers, injured soldiers, soldiers going AWOL and those who survived their tours, only to be re-enlisted against their will. Really, they pull as much drama as they possibly can about how hard it is to be a soldier. Today's really supposed to be just for remembering the fallen soldiers, but we can also take a minute here to appreciate the living veterans, too, because in no way is that an easy road to walk.
Having missed out on getting up to Canada (hey, how about a refund of that $500?) Brandon heads over to the Mexican border instead (well, it is closer...) with Michelle and his mother, but he decides against deserting the U.S. and eventually gets back on the bus with the other soldiers. I get it, Mexican food is fine once in a while, but it can't compare to Texas BBQ.
Directed by Kimberly Peirce (director of "Carrie" (2013))
Also starring Ryan Phillippe (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last heard in "Pinocchio" (2022)), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Rob Brown (ditto), Abbie Cornish (last seen in "Geostorm"), Victor Rasuk (last seen in "Reptile"), Quay Terry, Josef Sommer (last seen in "Strange Days"), Linda Emond (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "In the Land of Saints and Sinners"), Mamie Gummer (last seen in "Side Effects"), Alex Frost (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Matthew Scott Wilcox, Connett Brewer, Chandra Washington, Cora Cardona (last seen in "Fast Food Nation"), Isreal Saldivar, Lee Stringer, JD Evermore (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Cory Hart (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Marie Mizener, Kasey Stevens (last seen in "Life or Something Like It"), Ricky Calmbach, Richard Dillard (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), James D. Dever (last seen in "Brothers"), Mark Richard, Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Steven Strait (last seen in "Sky High"), Tory Kittles (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Peter Gerety (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Victor Garcia Jr., Robert Farrior (last seen in "American Made"), Erik Anderson, Peter Cornwell, Spencer Greenwood, D.J. Morrison, and the voice of Margo Martindale (last seen in "Rocket Science")
RATING: 5 out of 10 tequila shots
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