WARFARE

Here's the honest tension at the heart of this one. Warfare is a serious, patriotic piece of filmmaking, co-made by an actual Ramadi combat veteran, and it honors real soldiers' bravery and self-sacrifice without turning their suffering into spectacle for its own sake. That's rare, and it matters.

But the content is extreme by any measure. Nearly 50 f-words. A relentless, graphically bloody final hour. And an opening scene of soldiers cheering a sensual swimsuit-model video that has nothing to do with the rest of the film and adds nothing worth the cost.

Craft and conviction don't cancel out content. This is a film that respects the men it depicts, but it does not respect its audience's conscience enough to leave out what didn't need to be there. For that reason, even adults who want to honor the military should look elsewhere.

The practical answer: skip it.

Based on real testimony, Warfare follows a group of U.S. soldiers during the Battle of Ramadi on November 19, 2006. Under cover of night, they quietly take over a two-story residential building to conduct surveillance, breaking a hole in one wall so snipers can watch the street below.

By morning, the streets are alive with activity, and the soldiers grow increasingly uneasy about a doorway they can't see into. Then the street empties all at once — and everything changes.

Three stars means this is a well-made film with real strengths and real weaknesses — not a triumph, not a failure. The sound design is genuinely exceptional, particularly in a Bradley tank bombing sequence that shifts between deafening silence and agonized screaming; it's Oscar-caliber work.

The film's first act, though, drags — thirty minutes of soldiers watching and waiting through dense military jargon before the action begins. And once the shooting starts, the movie never pauses to let viewers know these men as individuals. It's an ensemble of names without faces, dialogue that's tactical rather than personal, and no heroic speeches or heartfelt revelations anywhere in it. The result is a battle that's gripping in craft but distant in feeling — you want the soldiers to survive, but you never quite know them.

What this film gets right, it gets right forcefully. It honors bravery, selflessness, and the soldiers who risked and lost everything for each other at Ramadi — the movie is dedicated to them. Its dominant worldview is patriotic and redemptive: men running into danger to save the wounded, refusing to leave anyone behind. That's a real and biblical good.

The filmmakers position this movie as part of a broader turn in Hollywood away from stories that critique the military toward stories that simply honor it. We think that shift is welcome, and this film is a serious example of it.

But the film's virtues arrive wrapped in content that undercuts its own case for adult viewing — extreme language, extended graphic violence, and a gratuitous sexual sequence that has no place in a story this serious. A film can be patriotic and morally earnest and still ask too much of the viewer's conscience to sit through it.

The soldiers here lay down comfort and safety for each other, echoing a truth Scripture states plainly: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). That instinct toward sacrifice is worth honoring — even when the film carrying it isn't worth recommending.

Warfare respects the soldiers it depicts more than it respects the audience watching them. There's real craft here, and a patriotic heart that deserves credit — but the language, the violence, and an unnecessary sexual sequence push this well past what we can recommend. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch with the family instead? Start here:.