4 War Movies That Are War Crimes

There are several things that make a good war movie. gritty realism, emotion, and characters you care about. Now realism is pretty subjective, because what is real for people who never spent a day fighting a war is very different then what someone who spent two years fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan thinks is realistic.

I’m not looking for a Saving Private Ryan set in Iraq or Afghanistan, hell that wouldn’t even work. Shit, Damon even tried to make a war movie recently that was terrible. Maybe the realism of the two recent wars just sucks for movies, and that seriously pisses me off. If classics can be made about the war in Vietnam anything is possible

Not this classic

So the idea that the Iraq and Afghan wars aren’t the material for Hollywood movies is just stupid, after all how many movies does Tyler Perry play an uppity black woman with relative success?

 

Stop Loss

Stop Loss is (or was depending on if you believe the Army) the involuntary extension of a soldier’s contract. Though it should be noted that when you sign your enlistment contract you agree to this. Ryan Phillippe obviously had a problem with that.

The first major thing wrong with this movie is the ridiculous combat scene that it opens with. What do they think we do over there? Apparently “get in high speed car chase with Insurgents” is part of our battle plan because thats what these National Guard rejects do. I couldn’t find a video of this on YouTube, probably because even YouTube is ashamed.

What I did find was this retarded clip of Channing Tatum digging a fox hole in his front yard:

Again, what do they think we do during deployment? I think the only reason this somehow got put in the movie is because that one idiot who swears he knows a Vietnam veteran who digs fox holes in his yard while flipping out and looking for Charlie. Paramount pictures must operate under the logic that if enough jackasses say something it must happen like, all the damn time.

Another point that seems totally missed to everyone else is he goes AWOL for about 99% of the movie, meaning they titled the movie wrong. I get it he goes AWOL because he is told he is being sent back to Iraq. If he then went back (Spoiler: He does at the end anyway) I could get it being titled ‘Stop Loss’ but it since he just deserts the military thirty minutes into the film and drives across the country it should just be called ‘Douche bags Go East’.

Hey at least we get to see Robin kill himself.

Hello bright side!

 

Warrior

I’ll be the first to admit, outside of the stupid Marine side story they slap on half assed this movie would have been alright. unfortunately the retardation in the plot totally blinded me to everything else, even the fact that Kurt Angle was playing a Russian fighter that was named after Joseph Stalin.

This side plot could have totally been cut out and you would have been left with a the only real decent movie revolving around MMA released since the UFC got huge. Instead they went with some convoluted war hero angle.

Tommy Riordan comes home from Iraq and like any veteran worth his GI bill, moves into the his Dad’s attic in the ghetto and starts punching people in the face for fun. His brother is a broke teacher about to lose his house and teaches his students that if times are hard just beat people’s asses for money. They both enter into a generic UFC knockoff to win the prize money, they even have a Joe Rogan fill in. This is around the time they inject a shit ton of ‘war drama’ where it didn’t need to be.

Turns out a viral video of Tommy fighting is seen by a Marine in Iraq who recognizes him as an unknown Marine who saved his life by, and I quote “ripped the door off of a tank.” this flies in the face of logic, as tanks don’t have any fucking doors.

Find the door

It also comes out that he saved that Marine on his way out of the country while deserting his unit, no word on if him and Ryan Phillipe planned this out. Yes, you read that right, he was deserting while he was still in Iraq even though if someone tried that they would die quicker then he could rip a door off of a fake tank and have the video go viral.

So ignoring that he somehow made it all the way back to Boston head still attached, he also becomes a professional MMA fighter in about 30 seconds which does more to insult the sport then make him look like a badass. The dialog is painful to listen to, which I’ll chalk up to the fact everyone in this movie is severally brain damaged from blows to the head. Like this gem:

Brendan Conlon: That’s Tess. And that’s Emily and Rosie. They’re your nieces, Tommy.

Tom Conlon: Don’t know ’em.

Brendan Conlon: I know you don’t know them. Of course you don’t know them.

Tom Conlon: Why am I looking at pictures of people I don’t know?

Brendan Conlon: Because that’s my family.

Tom Conlon: And who are you exactly?

Brendan Conlon: I’m your brother, man.

Tom Conlon: You were in the Corps?

Brendan Conlon: What?

Tom Conlon: I said I didn’t know you were in the Corps.

Brendan Conlon: I wasn’t in the Corps.

Tom Conlon: Then you ain’t no brother to me. My brother was in the Corps.

When Tommy enters the cage to fight in the ‘Sparta’ tournament he is greeted by a huge crowd of Marines singing the Marine Corps’ Hymn in full dress uniform, despite the fact there is no military base in the area and I’m going to assume this UFC clone’s ticket prices are slightly out of the price range of anyone who lives off of a military paycheck.

The movie ends confusingly when Brendan beats Tommy’s ass and snaps his arm in half like it was made of balsa wood, the two then embrace and cry in the cage over accumulated brain trauma and broken bones.

Home Of The Brave

Jessica Biel, Sam Jackson, 50 Cent, and a host of others round out an impressive cast in this movie that should have been aborted after conception. Again, the main problem here is the total lack of realism, it honestly looks like they went out of the way to make the worse possible combat scenes in the history of war movies.

Just like Stop Loss, this movie has its heroes running around like total idiots the second they get shot at. At one point 50 Cent attempts to chase down an Insurgent and gets someone else killed because how retarded he is. Though to be fair everything comes full circle when 50 gets shot dead by police later on in the movie.

They also make a strange attempt to make a disability sexy when they have Jessica Biel strip down sans a hand and stare at herself in the mirror for an unsettling amount of time. Jackson becomes a suicidal alcoholic who brings yard workers to Thanksgiving dinner for some reason and says he never gave a shit about the soldiers who died under his care. In which case I guess he was a drunken asshole before he went to war anyway.

Going back to 50 Cent he decides to take the “fucking crazy” route in trying to get back together with his girlfriend. That route being taking her entire work hostage with a gun. The cops decide that shooting 50 cent isn’t really considered a crime anymore since so many people have done it (like sodomy!) and shoot his ass in the chest. Fortunately for this movie and the people in that diner 50 doesn’t get up from that one.

Jessica Biel is really the only one with a decent ending, getting a boyfriend and keeping her job as a PE teacher minus a hand. I think the moral of this story is in order to get over PTSD is to be a attractive white woman.

Obviously a normal female US Soldier

 

The Hurt Locker

This one is going to piss a lot of people off. I can’t count how many times my civilian friends have commented how ‘realistic’ and ‘gritty’ this pile of shit was. It even managed to win quite a few awards, though its pretty much hated throughout the US Military.

I could have filled this whole article with reasons why the Hurt Locker sucks, instead i’ll condense it down for the sake of your sanity. First the dialog is as about as authentic as two kids playing with toy soldiers in their back yard. Simply put, no one in the entire US military talks like that, even as a bad joke. Second, I don’t know where they were supposed to be in Iraq, but no base anywhere is that nice during a deployment. Their living quarters looked nicer then the living room i’m sitting in right now.

The fact they go out on missions in one truck is hilarious, no one does that not even special forces teams. They would have been killed quicker then they all would have been demoted for drinking like it was a college kegger in their rooms. It turns out they aren’t the only people who do dumb shit all over the place in Kathryn Bigelow’s version of the war. The bomb team comes up on a national guard unit who ditched their truck and are hiding in a compound.

Of course our fearless bomb tech SFC James can simply walk through the streets on his own with no fear, even though whatever was going on was enough to scare the shit out of about twelve soldiers to the point they abandon a truck in the middle of the city, if this was the real Army those guys would have been raped with the UCMJ so hard they would shit Army Regulations.

Then there comes one scene that is just mind boggling. The bomb teams comes up on a team of British SAS (the UK’s Green Berets, just more badass) who are all quickly shot to pieces by an Insurgent sniper. A goddamn bomb tech, which should be noted is by no means a special forces unit or anything similar in the US Army, picks up the SAS’s sniper rifle and goes on to kill the hell out of everything.

Aint nothing but a thing

The last scene in the movie trumps even that one, when for some reason the US Army’s idea of ‘looking for bomb makers’ consists of running off blind into the night with no night vision gear into a city with only three people, who all promptly split up. Running like special ed children though alleyways lighting up everything like New Years Eve with flash lights and screaming at each other just to make sure every terrorist in the area knows whats going on.

This causes one member of the team to get captured by insurgents, since he obviously forgot how to use the goddamn rifle he was carrying. James then of course saves his life by shooting him in the leg? Okay that works. I guess thats better then the scene he tries to defuse a bomb with a bolt cutter and good intentions. I’m convinced the only research they did into this movie was watching old Chuck Norris movies while drunk.

 

I loved Delta Force