My Review: Home of the Brave (4/10)

"Will, what happened over there?"

This was the last film directed by Academy Award winning producer Irwin Winkler who recently has gone back to doing what he does best: producing movies. Home of the Brave is an overly melodramatic war film that fails to connect with the audience despite its good intentions. The acting in this film is pretty bad, the script is absolutely terrible, and the direction felt too generic. The script, written by Mark Friedman, was very unsubtle, hammering us over the head with the PTSD suffered by the soldiers who returned home from Iraq. Several war films have dealt with these issues far better and in a more subtle manner than Home of the Brave does. Winkler has good intentions with this film, he doesn't try to send a political anti-war message or anything like that but rather focuses on the pain the soldiers have to face when they return home and how difficult adapting can become for them. Those noble intentions, didn't translate well into a film that was full of war cliches and terrible dialogues. It became too melodramatic and the characters were never developed realistically. It just rang false and it should've dealt with such a serious issue in a more complex manner. I couldn't connect with any of the characters in this film and was disappointed with Winkler's direction.

The story follows a group of soldiers in the Iraq War who are pleased to receive the news that their tour of duty is coming to an end in two weeks. As they make plans of what they will do when they return home, they are sent on a humanitarian mission to deliver some medical supplies at a nearby village. One of the convoys is driven by Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel), while another one is guarded by Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), his hometown best friend Jordan (Chad Michael Murray), and Jamal (50 Cent). A surgeon named Will Marsh (Samuel Jackson) also accompanies them on the mission. Upon arriving at the village the unit is ambushed and several lives are lost, while others suffer psychological traumas and physical injuries. The lives of these soldiers are changed forever and once they arrive home to their families they must learn how to adjust to their "normal" lives. We see how each one of these characters have difficulty doing so as they continue to be emotionally torn by the war, while some of them continue to cross each other's path back home in Washington.

Home of the Brave felt tremendously out dated despite it only being made 7 years ago. It probably has to do with the fact that this film was a bit lazy in the way they tried to tackle the subject matter. It is something we've seen in many other war movies recently that have had a much more subtle approach. This film just felt too repetitive and predictable. The performance from the cast also hurt this film tremendously and not even Samuel L Jackson could do enough to save this. There is a short cameo by Christina Ricci that really felt out of place, like many other moments in this film. The different stories didn't connect very well either and the characters were just presented in a very lazy manner. Home of the Brave has all the war cliches you can think of and doesn't present anything groundbreaking or original.

My Review: Touchback (3/10)

¨A man looks back 15 years to the injury that ended his career as a promising high-school football player.¨

There are several great and inspiring football movies that have been made over the years and I`m usually a sucker for those kind of sport movies because I love sports. Touchback however was not the case; it was a really poorly produced film with a bad script and one dimensional characters. The makeup was terrible as well; there is one scene where we see an old Kurt Russell and the makeup is just so distracting. But the worst thing about this movie was the casting. It just didn’t work because you have some really old people playing High-school football players. I mean some of these guys just looked even too old to be professional football players, they looked like retired players. This was perhaps the weakest link that the movie had since the idea seemed interesting on paper, but it just didn’t work on film. Considering that the makeup was so bad I guess it would be impossible to cast younger actors since half of the film takes place 15 years after the main character suffers a serious injury that ends his football career, and the other half goes back to that moment. In a year where there have been great sport movies made like Moneyball and Warrior, this was just one forgettable movie, and perhaps one of my least favorite films of the year. Director Dan Handfield is never able to deliver a believable moment in Touchback, and the script written by himself really didn’t help either.

Scott Murphy (Brian Presley) has been selected as the best High school player of the nation and has several college offers that would allow him to finally leave the small town he`s in. Under the guidance of Coach Hand (Kurt Russell) he has taken his school to the Ohio state final and now they are facing one of the toughest schools which has more students in its High school than the entire population of his town. Scott sets up a winning drive scoring the final touchdown in the last seconds of the game, but he suffers a severe injury that will end his dreams of becoming a professional player. Fifteen years go by and we see Murphy living in the same town working as a farmer. He is in debt and things don’t seem to be working out for him although he has two beautiful daughters and a loving wife named Macy (Melanie Lynskey who is better known for her role as Rose in the Two and a Half Men sitcom). His best friend from High school, Hall (Marc Blucas) is back in town driving a fancy Porsche as he has made it as a professional football player. He also happens to be married to Jenny (Sarah Wright), Scott`s former school girlfriend. Murphy is haunted by his past and that injury that changed his life. Seeing how things are going so bad for him he decides to try to commit suicide, and while doing so he wakes up fifteen years in the past one week before the big game that changed his life forever.

The story seems interesting and it has actually been done in other movies before in different ways. The most recent that comes to mind is 17 Again which starred Zac Efron. This one fails however due to the bad casting and a poor script. The movie is very predictable and at times very slow paced. It`s too bad because Kurt Russell is a great actor and he was completely misused here. The last time I saw him playing a Coach was when he played the U.S. national hockey team Coach in Miracle. Productions between these two movies can`t even be compared with each other. Touchback is a very forgettable movie and one that I wouldn’t be recommending to anyone. The movie is also very predictable and there really isn’t anything memorable or inspiring about it. It tries to be an inspirational sport movie, but if fails now that the bar has been lifted by the numerous great sport films that have been released in recent years.

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