Directed by Henry Alex Rubin
Written by Henry Alex Rubin and Sean Mullin
Starring Jai Courtney, Nat Wolff, Finn Wittrock, Arturo Castro and Beau Knapp
MPAA rating: R for pervasive language, some violence and disturbing images

Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes

by Audrey Callerstrom

Henry Alex Rubin’s military/family drama Semper Fi is three films. One film is a drama about a group of friends in the Marine Corp Reserves that live in a small New York town near the Canadian border. Told documentary-style much like “Friday Night Lights,” this portion of the film is the most sincere. The film opens with a scene of the friends bowling, laughing and riffing with the alley staff. Another film is a drama that shows them stationed in Iraq, at one moment filling sandbags, the next dealing with IEDs and gruesome injuries. The last film, the weakest one, involves a standard and rather unjustified prison break plot.

Semper Fi follows Callahan (Jai Courtney), a cop, his military friends and his troublemaking brother who goes by Oyster (Nat Wolff). While they’re not called for duty, they’re a happy group of townie buddies not unlike the crew in Good Will Hunting. They hang, they drink, they frequent bars where the food comes in baskets. One night Oyster is shoved into a bathroom stall at a bar and, after shoving back in self-defense, inadvertently kills the other man after his head hits a urinal. Oyster is given 25 years in prison. Callahan grapples with his brother’s sentence and subsequent failures to appeal as he and his friends are deployed to Iraq.

The Iraq scenes, while brief, vary from the aforementioned filling of sandbags to Jaeger (Finn Wittrock) losing his leg, Lieutenant Dan-style, albeit far more violent. The abrupt violence during these scenes is distracting. A severed leg with bloody muscle tissue strewn about might be at home in Saving Private Ryan, but here it doesn’t justify itself. What’s at stake if we don’t really know much about Jaeger besides the fact that he wears cologne with a silly name? Its purpose is twofold: to show us the horrors of war and to give Jaeger an identifying trait – he is the guy who lost his leg. Snowball (Arturo Castro, Jaime from “Broad City”) is the non-white guy, and Milk (Beau Knapp) is the family man. In Iraq, Callahan shoots and kills an Iraqi man at point-blank range. This gives him some (but not enough) opportunity to contemplate the consequences of his actions in Iraq, where he’s deemed a hero, against his brother’s, who is beaten by guards and denied appeal. The movie never really explores this guilt or gives us enough background on the relationship with Oyster to stay invested.

But why break Oyster out of prison? If Oyster was completely innocent, or destined for greater things, or portrayed as more than a punk and a felon, this moment would feel triumphant. But this film isn’t Shawshank Redemption. Oyster committed a crime, and without enough efforts to work within the system (even though Jaeger’s ex, Leighton Meester, is a lawyer), Callahan and his friends decide to use their military skills and equipment (including a signal jammer) to circumvent it.

The documentary-style of the first part of the film is not by accident. Director Rubin (who co-wrote the film with Sean Mullin, a military veteran) made 2005’s documentary Murderball about quadriplegics who played rugby. In Semper Fi (which means “always faithful” and is the motto of the Marine Corps), the vulnerability and emotion that was on display in Murderball is hidden behind an uneven script, two-dimensional characters and a supposedly triumphant ending that feels anything but.

Find this flick on demand.