Taking Chance

A fascinating meditation on military loss and grief that could have so easily turned into an emotional button pressing exercise, HBO's Taking Chance is a highly recommended take on the repatriation of America's slain.

Kevin Bacon is excellent as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, an ex-marine who has taken a desk job at Quantico in order to analyse the distribution of man-power in Iraq. He is moved to become a military escort having witnessed the upsurge of deaths in Iraq and realising that one of the most recent casualties hailed from his home town.

Strobl embarks on a journey across the country and his expected destination of Colorado is rerouted to Wyoming since the family of PFC Chance Phelps has requested that he be buried there instead. A relatively short film, the painstaking recreation of the journey is exacting since Strobl himself wrote the screenplay and the action is entirely based on true events. The professionalism of Bacon's Strobl is unfaltering and offers an insight into the true face of patriotism in Middle America. Every house has a flag outside, everyone who witnesses the motorcade turns their headlights on as they offer reverence to the fallen.

There's potentially more interesting parts of the journey to develop as a jobsworth airport employee provides resistance to Strobl’s insistence that he won't remove his jacket to go through an x-ray scanner so it does not denigrate the uniform of the United States Marine Corp, though there is little sense that there is any anti-war sentiment in anyone met along the journey, presumably since Strobl didn't encounter any. Bacon is excellent throughout and familiar faces from US Television (Gordon Clapp and Paige Turco from NYPD Blue) provide stoic support. It’s just a shame that this film, intended for cinemas, leapfrogged its intended target and went direct to television, presumably due to a number of inferior similarly themed releases.



Released on DVD on 1st February 2010 by Warner Home Video.

Written by Simon Cole.