Home of the Brave. It seemed like a good idea at the time. (*****5/10)
After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff. And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching. Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery. It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life. The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter. The Deer Hunter this is not. Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences. And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert. But the rest of the cast is weak at best.
Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall. Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell. Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man. Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy. Or so this movie would have you believe. And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.
There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people. But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure. Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers. And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept. What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power. It’s too bad.