Entertainment

Common sense a casualty of anti-war script

Bad news for “The Mes senger,” a drama in which soldiers on the home front pass along the news about troops killed in Iraq: The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie “Taking Chance” got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Ben Foster, whose performance suggests everything he knows about the military he got from watching Ryan Phillippe in “Stop-Loss,” plays a wounded sergeant who is inexplicably placed on casualty-reporting detail with three months to go in his enlistment. Why would an infantryman-

mechanic, a staff sergeant, be given such a sensitive assignment after five minutes’ coaching from a grizzled officer (48-year-old Woody Harrelson, playing the world’s oldest captain)?

He wouldn’t. As the Kevin Bacon movie showed, such tasks are highly sensitive and are taken seriously by the military, not handed to a couple of drunken yahoos who act like fratty frenemies (starting fights in public, etc.). The younger man visits a store where he casually leafs through a magazine before informing the store owner that his son is dead.

The two soldiers get spat on by one next of kin (Steve Buscemi) and the sergeant starts stalking a widow (Samantha Morton) all over town, even showing up uninvited at her husband’s funeral dressed for a picnic.

Foster, trying to be all Martin Sheen at the beginning of “Apocalypse Now” (lots of wall-punching and sleeping on floors — he’s miffed at his girlfriend for being engaged to someone who isn’t a rageaholic), is unaware that sergeants don’t mouth off to captains (nor do captains chauffeur sergeants around). He keeps dissing the senior man by failing to call him “Sir” and growling lines such as “What’s your point?”

Capt. Woody, meanwhile, keeps calling Sgt. Ben in the middle of the night to beg him to go skirt-chasing. No-go, guys. Wouldn’t happen. Jiggling the camera doesn’t make your film authentic.

Except for Foster’s lurking and Harrelson’s coming unhinged, there isn’t a plot. As in “Stop-Loss” and “Grace Is Gone,” the only point is that the writer (Oren Moverman, who also directed) enjoys dribbling bits of little anti-war speeches into a cliché-riddled script meant to reassure us that military men, even those handpicked for the most delicate missions, are flailing, snarling, tortured jerks. I can picture the military’s reply to the actors: Speak for yourselves, gentlemen.