Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is the most disappointing film of the year.
A sort of Iraq War update of “Flags of Our Fathers,” this film by Oscar-winning director Ang Lee marries high-def film with a low-cal story centering on a bunch of soldiers hanging around at a football game while we await a big revelation that never arrives.
Billy Lynn (played with considerable heart by newcomer Joe Alwyn) is a soldier on leave back home in Texas, where he and his squadmates are to be fêted at the halftime show held during a fictional Dallas football team’s Thanksgiving Day game. Spc. Lynn is the star of what became an indelible photo of the Iraq War: After his sergeant (Vin Diesel) came under fire, Billy dashed out into the open to save him. The sergeant died in the fighting anyway, and now Billy is stricken with survivor’s guilt, PTSD and political disillusionment.
He and his comrades in arms intend to make the most of their stateside jaunt, partying with cheerleaders and accepting applause. Instead, they are cheated by the football team’s ruthless owner (Steve Martin), disappointed by their agent (a low-key Chris Tucker, trying to sell their story to Hollywood), and generally disgusted by the capitalist depravity around them.
The film is anti-American, yet not in a gonzo Oliver Stone way: It’s lazy and shallow, like that college freshman who’s home for the holidays and eager to tell you all about what he gleaned from “The Marx-Engels Reader.” Based on a novel by Ben Fountain, “Billy Lynn” goes to silly extremes to make the point that our soldiers are hapless victims of crass exploitation by a gluttonous, imperialist and vapid American culture: Twice within a matter of hours, Texas rednecks — not generally noted for being anti-military or unpatriotic — start fights with the soldiers, underlining Fountain’s dreary term-paper point that the Iraq War was the logical outcome of America’s vices.
Mistaking condescension for sympathy, the film may please the militant pacifists but few others will be fooled: File this one among the previous spate of strident anti-Iraq War movies (2007-2010), all of which flopped. Like those dreadful earlier films, this one shoehorns in stale Huffington Post talking points, this time rattled off by Kristen Stewart as Billy’s sister, who tries to steer him into getting himself declared unfit for service by a shrink. Billy sees this as dishonorable (I guess), but Lee doesn’t explore the point: Lots of close-ups of Billy looking sad are as far as they go into psychology.
Apart from a few minutes of flashback battle footage, which builds to a climax that doesn’t change anything, the movie mostly consists of tiresome nudge-nudging (message: “Can’t you idiots see the Iraq War was bad?”). “Billy Lynn” wishes it were something like “The Hurt Locker.” Instead, it’s more like “The Snark Locker.”