Paramount / MTV Home Entertainment
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For some reason I always hold out hope for an MTV film. But I fear they might have hit their stride during ‘Election.’ Even so, I was hoping a cast with such star assets as Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt - that maybe a miracle was possible. False. “Stop-Loss”’s political agenda is told through the story of Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) whose hometown reunion from Iraq is cut short after the army forces him back into service against his will; aka, getting stop-lossed. After suffering an initial breakdown upon hearing the news, Phillippe goes AWOL and becomes a fugitive. Sgt. Steve Shriver (Tatum) tries to come to his rescue by playing the negotiator. “Stop-Loss” tries to appeal to generation-20’s the same way “Jarhead” does but falls short in just about every way. The movie suffers from trying to oversell the both mental and physical damage the war has put on these young soldiers—-even though we only see the principal cast actually in war during the first five minutes. If I were to rate this movie in Hog faces, I would give it two out of five. As for MTV Films, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for “Coxblocker.”