After transferred to Hard Site, a cellblock that supposedly houses hard-core terrorists, he starts secretly to develop a friendship with named Ghazi Hammoud, accused of having engineered a deadly bombing. What happens to Ghazi leads to the breakdown of Jack into a hardened man capable of anything.
"Boys of Abu Ghraib" has a few, brief insights into how boredom, anger, and frustration helped fuel the rage that led to torture but the film couches it all in the filmmaking of TV-movie melodrama, draining it of all potential power or social context.
Moran's writing and directing debut is an admirably ambitious examination of the one-baby-step-at-a-time process that leads a fundamentally decent person to shut down his moral compass do things that are, by any objective standard, reprehensible.
For a film about the hardened soldiers who oversaw the most notorious detainment center of the Iraq War, Boys Of Abu Ghraib is remarkably squeamish about tackling its subject matter head-on.
What made these soldiers participate in such deplorable activities? Boys of Abu Ghraib attempts to answer that question. The explanations it comes up with may not be definitive, but they certainly make for a powerful, hard-hitting drama.
A halfhearted attempt at truly getting inside these men's and women's heads to make sense of their actions, which is ostensibly the purpose of dramatizing such a recent and shameful ordeal.
It's a shame the picture ends on its knees when it had to the potential to create a certain viewpoint that could invite an understanding of the Abu Ghraib prison environment and the stress placed on all involved parties.
