<em>Last Flag Flying</em> Is Too Muted to Be Memorable
Last Flag Flying is a movie about grief in all its mundanity—an intimate, intentionally drab portrait of a man wrestling with the loss of his son. It’s also a road-trip film, an adult-oriented laugher about three long-lost friends reuniting and traveling together in remembrance of better times. But then it’s also trying to wrestle with the paradoxes of the U.S. military and the unfair, seismic tolls two wars—in Vietnam and Iraq—took on the country’s service members.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Richard Linklater’s new film,sounds simple enough—three veteranscrossing the country together to transport the body of a fallen soldier to his hometown. But the film feels half-formed, sometimes trying to be raucously confrontational, other times excessively sedate. Like some of the weakest efforts in Linklater’s career (, ), this movie sees the director trying to tackle a grand issue from too many angles, and emerging with no major new insights.
