The clichés come hard, competing with images you recognize from news footage and stories. This harrowing sequence features snap-pans, bloody limbs, and fast-cuts, vehicles trapped in streets, snipers sniping and bombs exploding. Images of furtive “insurgents” planting IEDs under “Middle Eastern”-sounding music lead to the unit’s last mission, a supply run in Al Hayy. The problems at home are set up in Iraq (the film was shot in Morocco). The focus on the Guard unit is also potentially provocative, given the war’s specific demands on such groups, their affiliations with home states, and their indeterminate status, both in country and at home.

As these difficulties are often brought on by broken systems at home, the film’s title is especially resonant (if unfortunate, as more than a few movies share it, including Mark Robson’s look at racism during WWII, released in 1949). troops and their families (though not Iraqis, as that would be another movie). Like the much-trumpeted, short-lived TV series Over There, it means to make visible the dreadful difficulties, to take seriously the situations of U.S. In this context, Home, for all its cumbersome sincerity and script, is an “important” movie. On another level, however - and Home makes this point repeatedly - this particular war is producing special tangles of problems, beginning with the fact that the administration can’t admit how badly it’s going. On one level, such lack of comprehension is typical: war is indescribable to those who haven’t experienced it, though artists persist in describing it, war after war. In particular, these troubles are born of inattention, underfunding, and general ignorance, as loved ones and strangers, as well as institutions supposedly designed to “help” all fail to comprehend the extent of the traumas suffered by their soldiers.

With that, you pretty much know what’s about to happen in Home of the Brave, Irwin Winkler’s utterly sincere and poorly executed look at veterans’ troubles readjusting to the World. This is a unit headed back from Iraq, if only they can survive one more mission. Jamal just knows Keisha’s going to be happy to see him (he imagines her “sittin’ on daddy’s lap, playin’ with the anaconda”). Jordan (Chad Michael Murray) is going to buy a house and fix it up. They’re all going home, just notified that in two short weeks, their repeatedly extended tours are done. He’s briefly happy, playing football with his fellow National Guardsmen in Iraq. “I’m going home,” exults Jamal (50 Cent). It’ll leave you physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred. Death gotta be easy, ’cause life is hard.

Home of the brave movie 1949