Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

‘Home of the Brave’ tries, but it’s a bundle of clichés

Mediocre movies don’t often implode in spectacular fashion; usually they just slowly deflate under the accumulated weight of their banalities and absurdities.

The earnest but hopelessly hokey “Home of the Brave,” clearly inspired by the 1946 classic “The Best Years of Our Lives,” is an exception — about two-thirds in, there’s a moment that will prompt audiences to cringe en masse.

It comes when phys-ed teacher Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel), an Army National Guard soldier who has recently returned from a tour in Iraq in which she lost a hand to a roadside bomb, finally lets herself open up emotionally.

She sits on her couch telling her war story to Cary (Jeffrey Nordling), a cute fellow teacher. They stare into each other’s eyes and he takes her hands — one real, one prosthetic — in his.

At this point, a low groan of wary “oh, no” anticipation rumbled through the audience at my screening. And then our fears were realized: Cary lifted Vanessa’s prosthetic hand and tenderly kissed it.

Derisive laughter rippled through the theater — surely not the reaction director Irwin Winkler and writer Mark Friedman were aiming for.

It’s no fun to criticize a movie like this, which is sincere to a fault and speaks uncomfortable truths about the apathy of a nation as its sons and daughters bleed on foreign battlefields.

But “Home of the Brave” is what it is — mawkish and awkward, cliché piled on cliché, with dialogue that starts out bad and goes downhill from there.

The opening scene takes us to Iraq (actually Morocco) to introduce us to Price and fellow guardsmen Lt. Col. Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), a surgeon, and infantrymen Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), Jamal Aiken (Curtis Jackson, better known as rapper 50 Cent) and Jordan Owens (Chad Michael Murray).

Word has just come that their unit is going home in two weeks. But then they’re called out for one last mission to make a humanitarian medical aid run.

Winding through narrow village streets, they’re trapped in a classic Ambush Alley scenario, with snipers materializing on rooftops and in windows and kids lurking in doorways blowing off remote-controlled improvised explosive devices.

Vanessa is badly wounded; so is Jamal. And Tommy watches in horror as Jordan, his best friend, is shot to death by an insurgent.

The scene then abruptly shifts to Spokane, Wash., as Vanessa, Will, Tommy and Jamal try to readjust to civilian life.

The issues depicted are heartbreakingly real, but the film gives off a strong whiff of having been made by people who have only heard about these problems rather than lived them.

(And so it is — Winkler is a veteran Hollywood producer with scant directing experience, and Friedman’s credits include serving as “events manager” for Conan O’Brien’s 10th anniversary TV special.)

A big part of the problem is structural. The focus constantly shifts among the four principals, alighting on each for only three or four minutes at a time. This keeps viewers from emotionally bonding with any one character and keeps the film superficial as it skims the stock list of veterans’ readjustment problems.

See that vet alienate family and friends. See this vet hit the bottle. See that vet rant about his screwed-up disability paperwork. See this vet lash out in group therapy. See that vet’s father call him a wussy for wanting to seek mental health treatment.

And so on and so forth.

“Home of the Brave” has its heart in the right place, but the definitive Iraq war movie is still waiting to be made.

2 stars. Rated R for violence, language. Opens May 11.