It has profanity, scenes of violence and one sexual situation.ĭirected by Irwin Winkler written by Mark Friedman director of photography, Tony Pierce-Roberts edited by Clayton Halsey music by Stephen Endelman production designers, Jonathan McKinstry and Warren Alan Young produced by Rob Cowan, George Furla and Avi Lerner released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. “Home of the Brave” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Consider “Home of the Brave” an honorable dud.
#NO LONGER HOME OF THE BRAVE MOVIE#
Yes, the movie has action and high drama, but most of it feels synthetic.
Jamal soon goes ballistic and has a melodramatic standoff with the police at a fast-food outlet. With his scenes crudely shoehorned into the movie, Curtis Jackson (the rap star 50 Cent) plays Jamal Aiken, a lighted stick of dynamite with whom Tommy clashes in a group therapy session. Tommy discovers that his old job in a gun store has been taken, and he is pushed by his bullying father to be a police officer, but nothing he tries seems to stick. Right who works at the school where she teaches. Meanwhile Vanessa, a single mother, rejects her old boyfriend and tries to pretend that life, despite a prosthetic hand, is the same as it was before. Rowell at least strike a few angry sparks. If the father-son scenes feel stiffly contrived, Mr. Will hits the bottle, battles his hostile teenage son (Sam Jones III) and drives his wife, Penelope (Victoria Rowell), to the end of her patience. The dialogue is so wooden you almost expect to hear “the horror, the horror.” As they try to adapt to civilian life, the movie too insistently splices their everyday experiences with flashbacks of their war experiences. Then suddenly we’re back in the States, where, after their welcome-home parties, the traumatized soldiers stew and sulk while loved ones question them worriedly and try to understand. “Home of the Brave” feels both premature and hopelessly stale: premature because so many thousands of American troops remain in Iraq with no timetable for an exit, and stale because the drama suggests a pallid imitation of the real thing so easily found in documentaries like “The War Tapes.” “Home of the Brave” suggests that when the time comes for Hollywood to take on the war in Iraq, those documentaries are going to pose a serious challenge to filmmakers seeking credibility.Ĭurtis Jackson, center, a k a the rapper 50 Cent, in Home of the Brave, about soldiers home from Iraq. Devoid of personality, their tidy cut-and-paste speeches have the ring of carefully composed and edited distillations of previous home-from-the-front movies.įunctional clockwork is not to be confused with good timing. Jackson as Will Marsh, a glowering, embittered Army medic who, once he is stateside, develops a drinking problem.īy the end of “Home of the Brave,” you may feel as if you have just sat through an earnest made-for-television movie featuring actors who are too pretty to be real people dutifully recycling a formula.
Most of those noises emanate from Samuel L. But as this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters. The kindest description of “Home of the Brave,” the first Hollywood movie to examine the experience of American soldiers returning from Iraq, might be that it is fueled by noble intentions.ĭirected by Irwin Winkler from a script by Mark Friedman, a first-time screenwriter, it wants to be a smaller-scaled, contemporary “Best Years of Our Lives.” And two of its characters - one who has lost a hand and another who can’t settle down - carry echoes of that 1946 William Wyler classic.
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