Definitively answering the question of what would happen if the hippie-chic mannequins in a Forever 21 shop window attained sentience, Danny Mooney's "Love and Honor" spins a tale of Vietnam-era romance so bland that its period inauthenticity begins to exert a surreal fascination.
Definitively answering the question of what would happen if the hippie-chic mannequins in a Forever 21 shop window attained sentience, Danny Mooney’s “Love and Honor” spins a tale of Vietnam-era romance so bland that its period inauthenticity begins to exert a surreal fascination. Boosted by the fortuitous presence of “Hunger Games” heartthrob Liam Hemsworth, as well as a similarly hulking co-star in Austin Stowell, the film should be able to rely on swooning teen-girl attention to draw some moderate VOD interest, having as it does few other commercial cards to play.
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Portentously framed between the launch and landing of the Apollo 11 in July 1969, the film’s action begins in the war zones of Vietnam, with well-groomed GIs Mickey Wright (Hemsworth) and Dalton Joiner (Stowell) out on patrol. Freewheeling ladies man Mickey mans the radio, while square-jawed, taut-sphinctered Dalton is the platoon’s de facto leader, driven by his all-consuming love for a gal named June (Aimee Teegarden) back home.
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In a scene so obviously predestined that it hardly even needed to be shot, Dalton receives a “dear John” letter immediately before a Viet Cong ambush, and the survivors are sent off on a weeklong R&R trip to Hong Kong immediately thereafter. Dalton decides to go temporarily AWOL and return to the States to win back June; Mickey follows him, oddly willing to abandon his enthusiastically planned week of carousing and risk serious imprisonment in order to follow a not-particularly-close friend halfway across the globe to Michigan.
Arriving in Ann Arbor, the two discover June has taken the name Juniper, and is living commune-style among some of the most fresh-scrubbed and lucid hippies known to man. Catching self-righteous static from the peaceniks, Mickey abruptly spins a tale pegging Dalton and him as conscientious Army deserters who hitchhiked from ‘Nam to Canada — while still in uniform — without any real trouble. This ruse makes the twosome heroes among the flower children, and Mickey’s increasingly bold (yet rarely politically specific) activist talk attracts the attention of free-thinking (yet also chaste and sober) flower-child Candace (Teresa Palmer).
From here it’s a standard-issue tour through a patchouli-scented CW sitcom landscape, with an anemic antiwar rally, a “Dragnet”-worthy be-in and a clothed skinny-dipping session giving the two love stories room to play out. That the film at least nods toward the draft-card anxieties of its characters and allows them one weed-smoking session sans repercussions count as welcome doses of realism in an otherwise entirely Disneyfied reimagining of ’60s counterculture.
Both male leads are extremely good-looking and occasionally shirtless in a film that asks little else of them. Save for some regrettable wardrobe decisions, the production values are perfectly suitable for such a modestly budgeted production.
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