Vietnam vet Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell) tracks down a pair of his old military friends: foul-mouthed and hard-drinking barkeep Sal (Bryan Cranston), and minister Mueller (Laurence Fishburne). Doc asks his two friends to accompany him to pick up the remains of his son, a Marine killed in Iraq. The three men set out on an odyssey to have the young man buried and to perhaps put some old ghosts to rest themselves.
This was based on the 2003 novel by Darryl Ponicsan, which was a sequel to his 1970 novel The Last Detail, which was memorably filmed in 1973 with Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, and Randy Quaid. Linklater, who co-wrote the script with Ponicsan, decided to alter this follow-up in several ways, changing the character names and a lot of their back story, but the essential dynamic is the same. I enjoyed this film well enough, but as a big fan of The Last Detail, I spent much of this movie's runtime comparing it, and wondering what might have been had this been filmed 15 years ago and with the original film's cast returning to their roles (Otis Young passed away in 2001, before the sequel novel was published). Seeing at least Nicholson and Quaid return in those roles would have been really something else.
All that aside, this is still a largely enjoyable movie, with good performances and some nice, quiet character moments. The film seems to want to say something about veterans, and what they feel and how they deal with the rest of their lives, and how they end up viewing their country that they sacrificed for but who may have ultimately been lying to them. However, the script doesn't put these thoughts together in a clear enough fashion to be making any kind of definitive statement, but it may be the case that there really isn't one. It's odd to think that a movie set in 2003 is a period piece, but it is, and much is made of a visit by the three aging buddies to a cell phone store to check out the new-fangled technology. I'm curious how this movie will be viewed by actual Vietnam-era military veterans.
