Quick interruption of our normal feeds to do a movie review.
The Messenger sets Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster as an Army team whose job it is to notify families of dead soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These two performances are outstanding and the character and setting framing is well enough to keep you interested. Ultimately though, this movie suffers the same problem as The Hurt Locker: it cuts in and out of a tense, war environment without wrapping the characters into a complete story. There’s no beginning, middle, and end. And when it does end, the sum of things you don’t know well exceeds anything you learned in two hours. So you feel less than satisfied.
But it does expose the massive amount of loss that our country has experienced in the last 10 years since the wars began. And no review of this film would be complete without expression a deep gratitude to the families and service people who suffer tremendously in obscurity.
Throw a comment if you’ve seen it. It’s streaming on Netflix.
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