Home of the Brave

There are many low budget movies that are still entertaining or at least watchable. This one is tough to get through. It's roughly 100 minutes but feels like a 3 hour movie. The acting is community-theater level and while the storyline is okay, the dialogue is really, really bad. The movie really needed some better sound and much better editing. Removing about 20 minutes of some of the hokey dialog and pointless scenes (a weird scene of a kid doing an embarrassed dance at a dinner reception, a pointless conversation in a music room, some hokey scenes in a diner, and a modern dance scene that comes out of nowhere) would have improved it. In addition, it's tough to really understand what the movie is trying to touch on. The description seems to indicate it's a movie about PTSD and while there are a couple of scenes that touch on that, it focuses more on a story of an innocent war veteran being shot during a police stop. Then there's the backdrop of a group of friends trying to build a community center. Ultimately, all of these different threads just don't come together very well.