Tin Soldier: Jamie Foxx Starts a Cult

Please, someone tell Hollywood there is more to the veteran experience than PTSD. Yes, it is sad reality and those who struggle with it deserve our support and understanding. Yet, there is also duty, honor, service, heroism, and comradery—which are all solid dramatic themes. Unfortunately, this film uses PTSD to define veterans and exploits it as a Macguffin to justify the formation of a sinister cult. It wasn’t a group of nobodies either. There are some big names in Brad Furman’s Tin Soldier, now playing in theaters.

As the film opens, Nash Cavanaugh is in worse shape than John Rambo at the start of the serious, psychologically realistic First Blood (Rambo #1). Cavanaugh had joined what he thought was a new agey PTSD peer-run treatment ominously called “The Program,” but it was really a personality cult led by the messianic Leon K. Prudhomme, who rebranded himself as “The Bokushi.”

Ironically, The Program started to work, but it was really because he fell in love with Evoli Carmichael. (By the way, I am absolutely not using a faulty AI program to generate these names.) Sadly, he accidentally caused her death while fleeing The Program to start a new life together. Since then, he just continued spiraling downward, until approached by commando Luke Dunn.

The FBI has laid siege to the Bokushi’s compound and is poised for a Waco-style assault. Before that happens, Dunn wants Cavanaugh to lead his team through the compound to take out Prudhomme and hopefully save lives, maybe even including Carmichael’s. Since her body was never recovered, maybe The Program faked her death. At this point, Cavanaugh slaps his forehead and says, “oh man, I wish I’d thought of that sooner.”

Of course, he agrees, even though Emmanuel Ashborn, the shady powerbroker financing the operation is obviously extremely sketchy. Further complicating matters, Dunn also recruits special operator Kivon Jackson, who is pointlessly hostile towards Cavanaugh.

Usually, when an unheralded film suddenly appears in theaters with a starry cast, in the case Robert De Niro, Jamie Foxx, and John Leguizamo, it is a strong indication of quality control issues, which is true here too. Bizarrely, even Rita Ora appears briefly as Dunn’s inside contact, Mama Suki, but by the time you start wondering if she’s really Ora, she’s already gone.

Frankly, the best work in the film comes from Scott Eastwood, who clearly wants to do right by his character and the issues he faces. Arguably, Foxx might have been entertaining in an over-the-top scenery-chewing kind of way, if Tin Soldier had been a more coherent film. Of course, De Niro just disinterestedly phones in scenes as Ashbrook. Frankly, he was probably thinking more about when the car service was scheduled to whisk him away to his next VOD shoot.