text: Over acted, heavy handed, full of speeches, preachy, on the nose, and over stylized in a way only MTV could be guilty of, Stop-Loss is agit-prop garbage. I expected a lot more with talented young actors such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ryan Philippe, but Screenwriter/Director Kimberly Peirce does a hatchet job of portraying the ill effects of war on American youth. I'm sure she did some work researching the Iraq war and the young men fighting in it, but you'd never guess it from watching Stop-Loss. In many ways this mess reminded me of Catherine Hardwicke's Lords of Dogtown, an equally inept, overly stylized, TV movie-like waste of solid subject matter.<br /><br />http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/