The sequence also grounds King as a man who's had his limit of combat. As the action unfolds, we feel him losing his stomach for the kind of unavoidable collateral damage that house-to-house action involves.
For King, the saving grace is that he's finally at the end of his tour, 150 combat missions behind him. He returns to Texas to an enthusiastic welcome-home parade and the love of a grateful community - there is even a U.S. senator on hand to slap him on the back.
There are immediate signs, though, that King and his comrades will not have a happy repatriation. What starts as a night of carousing turns into days, weeks of drinking and brawling. Girlfriends (Abbie Cornish) are abused, cars smashed, rednecks punched.
It's the sort of problematic re-adjustment covered in other homefront movies, but "Stop-Loss" is more focused and detailed. Director Kim Peirce became determined to make the definitive soldier's-eye-view movie after 9/11 inspired her brother to enlist. He served in Iraq and brought Peirce's attention to the emergency stop-loss provisions that enable the president to extend tours indefinitely - turning some volunteers into involuntary "draftees."
Peirce poured a ton of energy and six years into this project, and it's yielded some good stuff. In the movie's best scene, a soldier (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) uses useless wedding gifts for target practice when his out-of-control behavior ends his marriage.
There is also, alas, a nagging familiarity to some of the material, and Peirce leans heavily on dialogue to define her characters - speeches about soldier psychology too often sound like war-movie boilerplate.
