Stop-Loss

This movie has a message, at least is had that going for it. The problem is that the story is so messy that you stop caring about what it is trying to say and instead end up frustrated with the choices that the filmmakers made. I'm just going to review this in a bullet format, I feel too lazy to put in an effort to actually make a cohesive entry.

• Apparently everyone in Texas wears pearl snap shirts and those straw cowboy hats where the sides are curled up. I hate to dwell on it but pretty much every detail about Texas in this film seems wrong. The country kids dress like Abercrombie models, not at all like what they should look like, which is well, trash.
  
• I nominate Abbie Cornish for the worst southern accent I have ever heard. All she does is talk reeeeeeal slooooooow and reeeeeeeeeeal deeeeeeeeep. She doesn't have a pearl snap shirt though, she inexplicably has not one but two designer jackets.
  
• What kind of girlfriend leaves with your boyfriends best friend for a road trip to Washington? Then she throws a fit when he shows up on the trip pissed that she had left. Of course there were other circumstances that led to this fit but by that time I didn't care.
• Channing Tatum has something. He reminds me of a young Mark Wahlberg, even down to his voice. Ryan Phillipe also comes out of this unscathed.
  
• This movie's marketing is entirely misleading.
  
• I like Joseph Gordon-Letvitt as an actor but he really needs to cool it on playing the emotionally disturbed guy.
  
• This film may have the single most knee jerk reaction to a situation in the history of movies. After being set up as a great soldier in the early scene, Ryan Phillipe beats up a few soldiers and goes AWOL after being stop-lossed. Sure this is a crappy situation but wouldn't it make more sense for his best friend (Channing Tatum), the more volatile of the two, to make this kind of decision? It would also make more sense because Cornish is his girlfriend. And Phillipe makes this decision just because a senator makes a passing comment to him after a homecoming parade.
• There is a scene where Phillipe goes to visit on his men wounded in battle at a hospital later on in the movie. This is probably the best scene in the movie because it avoids all the cliches these kind of moments usually take on. The actor playing the injured soldier (sorry, I don't know his name) is perfect as a soldier ready to join the war again even after being blinded and losing both an arm and a leg.
  
• Actually the closing moments of the film are also quite good. It is here that we see that above everything else in war, it is really about the men standing beside you.
  
• Nice to see Laurie Metcalf show up in a movie, if only for a scene.