Homefront

A Quiet Life That Never Stays Quiet

I kept thinking, while watching Homefront, about how many American action movies begin with a man trying to disappear. He moves to a small town, trims his life down to a few objects, a child, maybe a porch, and hopes the country’s ugly appetite won’t find him. Of course it does.

That’s the bargain these films make: peace is only interesting if it’s about to be broken. Gary Fleder’s 2013 movie understands that bargain perfectly, maybe a little too perfectly. It’s an efficient, old-fashioned thriller with a pulse made of familiar parts, but there are moments when its bluntness starts to feel almost honest.

Not elegant. Not especially surprising. Honest, in the way a knuckle sandwich is honest.

Fleder isn’t a director who dazzles, and that’s actually useful here. His best work tends to live in the middle register: procedural tension, tight spaces, men who think they can outpace their past. Homefront comes from the Chuck Logan novel that Sylvester Stallone adapted years earlier, and you can feel Stallone’s fingerprints all over the thing even when his name isn’t in the frame.

He wrote the screenplay and produced it, which means this is very much one of his favorite stories: the hard man with the soft spot, the father whose violence is disciplined rather than glamorous, the American backroad as a place where civility is just a thin coat of paint. It’s in conversation with First Blood, with Cop Land, with the whole line of Stallone projects that ask what happens when a bruiser tries to retire and discovers retirement is mostly a fantasy for people who’ve never had to fight for it.

What I like, more than I expected to, is how often the movie lets the body tell the story before the dialogue does. Jason Statham has built a career out of controlled menace—he doesn’t swagger so much as compress, like a spring under pressure—and here that physical grammar fits Phil Broker almost too neatly. He moves carefully around his daughter, around his house, around strangers.

He’s always angled slightly forward, as if bracing for impact. That reserve becomes the movie’s main emotional fact. We understand immediately that this is a man trying not to become the thing he once was.