Review of Home of the Brave (2006) by Kyle H — 03 Nov 2007

This is an important film, woefully poor in it's execution. People need to see what's happening to the soldiers that are serving over there in this completely unjustifiable war. The script tries to show both sides of the war argument, and it succeeds, but only by demonizing or dumbing down the opposition in different cases:

"Gee, I thought they all hated us over there.".

"Why are you going to therapy? To talk about your feelings? What a Pussy.".

But when a couple of soldiers speculate about the prospect of statues of American soldiers being built in Baghdad, comparing Iraqis to the French in WWII, I nearly fainted. There's a better chance of me getting a tattoo of Renee Zellweger.

But, anyway the script is fucking awful, the direction is choppy and heavy-handed. (Except for the well-staged insurgent ambush set-piece.) And the acting, by everyone INCLUDING Samuel L. Jackson, is fucking abysmal.

Even Sam Jackson. I know. I'm surprised, too. I'ce never seen this man suck before. But he SUUUUUUUUUCKS in this. It's gotta be the script and the direction, mostly, but there's a scene where he shows up at Thanksgiving Dinner drunk, and he staggers around, slurring his speech and rips a lip ring out of the face of his anti-war teenage son, and the pure badness of his acting is just jawdropping.

Some soap opera pretty boy named Brian Presley plays the lead, and he does a lot of soap opera acting. Which is to say, he blows.

Jessica Biel is now firmly ensconced in the Jessica Alba class of "ridiculously-hot/ridiculously-bad". She plays what should be the juicy role here: Single mom, lost her hand in Iraq, can't look her old boyfriend in the eye ... and she just plays it with no imagination, no creativity, no anything worth watching.

And why the hell is 50 Cent in this movie? I could barely understand a word he said, he mumbles so much. He is just terrible, almost a worthless human being. I hope he dies trying to get rich soon.

Anyway, don't watch this movie.