Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is a soldier trying to cope with his return to civilian life in Stop-Loss.

Paramount Pictures / Frank Masi

A model soldier goes AWOL when he discovers that his plans to leave the U.S. Army have been canceled and he is being sent back to Iraq and goes on the run across country with the girlfriend of his best friend in the fast-paced and provocative Stop-Loss.

Director Kimberley Pierce’s film, her first since the groundbreaking Boys Don’t Cry, is at equal measures a bold in-your-face war movie, with a taut opening sequence of a military operation gone wrong in Iraq; an exciting man-on-the-run tale, and a film that brings to the front burner long-simmering questions about the ability of America’s volunteer fighting forces to be reassigned again and again to frontline battles in Iraq and Afghanistan because of a lack of replacement troops. It promises to create debate. And if, after all its provocative rancor, Stop-Loss tries in its odd ending not to offend anyone, at least it puts in bold, personal terms an issue that has rankled the military, soldiers and their families.

Stop-Loss is part of a long line of films about the difficulties returning soldiers face in adjusting to life back on the home front. In 1946 it was the Academy Award-winning The Best Years of Our Lives which looked at the problems faced by three heroes returning to their humdrum lives in a Midwest city following World War II. In the Vietnam era the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter looked at the effects of war on five friends both before and after their tour of duty, while Coming Home looked at the war through the eyes of three people, one of them a Vietnam veteran who returned a paraplegic.

Stop-Loss, whose title refers to the process in which soldiers who are about to leave the military are sent back for another tour of duty, is not the first film to deal with the home front problems faced by soldiers returning from Iraq. The 2006 film Home of the Brave, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Jessica Biel, which barely got a theatrical release and is now on DVD, explored many of these same issues in slightly more melodramatic, soap opera-ish terms.

But although Stop-Loss raises serious issues, and even has a thin romantic equation to deal with, much of it is played as a no-way-out thriller. Sensitive Army Sgt. Brandon King (played with a great deal of sympathy and charisma by Ryan Phillippe) is still feeling guilt for allowing the troops he was leading to fall into an ambush that left several of them dead or severely injured. When he hears that he has been ordered back to Iraq, he snaps, slugging the MPs who are escorting him to the stockade and stealing an Army Jeep for his getaway.

Soon he’s on the run from Texas to New York and back again, accompanied by Michelle (Abbie Cornish), the soon-to-be-ex-fiancee of his best friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum). She’s sympathetic to Brandon’s plight and finds Steve too changed by his war experiences to still be in love with him.

Soon Brandon is playing a dangerous game while hiding out from the military brass in hopes of getting his redeployment orders for Iraq rescinded. He feels blindsided by the Army and that the stop-loss orders, which have affected some 81,000 of the 650,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, is really “a back-door draft.”

Supported by his mother and, more reluctantly, his father, Brandon begins a soul-searching odyssey. At one point, when he confronts a team of robbers in an alley, it seems the United States can be just as dangerous as Iraq, which he has nightmares about. Along the way he meets a number of colorful characters, who include Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), one of his men who is now a blind double amputee in an Army hospital. There’s also a man who has been on the run with his family for 14 months, now near the breaking point and heading for Canada, while Pierce’s camera occasionally drifts back to Texas where another of Brandon’s men, Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is slowly unraveling as he fails to fit himself back into life at home.

The extensive use of a hand-held camera makes the film and its characters all the more real and gripping. Pierce’s work leading up to the ambush near the start of the film is excruciatingly tense; the quick cuts and many close-ups employed in the ambush sequence give it a cinéma vérité sense that’s harrowing.

Phillippe gives Brandon a haunted desperation that’s effective in bringing home his feelings of helplessness for having played by the rules and now finding himself thrust by the system into his own personal hell. Clearly he’s no coward, but a man with a strong sense of warmth and humanity. Cornish gives him fine support as the woman who finds in Brandon the sensitivity that’s missing in her own relationship. And yet, wisely, her relationship with Brandon is clearly not a sexual one, which would have brought Stop-Loss into soap opera land.

You can make what you want of the film’s ending, but Stop-Loss is guaranteed to raise questions and debate.

****Stop-Loss

Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ciaran Hinds.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com