T.K. (Michael Peña), Colee (Rachel McAdams) are soldiers returning to the United States from Iraq in The Lucky Ones. (Matt Dinerstein/Maple Pictures)

Did the makers of The Lucky Ones take note of the empty theatres and critical raspberries that have greeted most movies about the war in Iraq thus far? Did they witness viewers cold-shouldering films deemed too earnest (In the Valley of Elah) or too mawkish (Stop-Loss) or too didactic (Redacted)? Did director Neil Burger (The Illusionist), who co-wrote The Lucky Ones with Dirk Wittenborn, think, Let’s make a movie about the Iraq war that’s so generic and inoffensive, so deliberately not provocative in every respect, that people will actually come? If so, then here’s a followup question: Why make a movie about the war in Iraq if you have almost nothing to say about it?

That’s not to say The Lucky Ones is a terrible film. It has the light, pleasant texture of a solid 1980s TV movie, in which a series of contrivances exist only to showcase good actors taking a break from more taxing work.

The first, imperative contrivance is a blackout that grounds airlines and lands three soldiers in a rental car bound for Vegas. T.K. Poole (Michael Peña) is on a 30-day leave, hoping to hire a call girl to get his mojo back after a thigh-high shrapnel injury mangled his sex life. Bright-eyed Colee (Rachel McAdams), also on leave, wants to return her deceased soldier-boyfriend’s guitar to his family. Cheever (Tim Robbins ) is the patriarch, a graying reservist whose tour of duty is officially over, freeing him to return to his wife and son in suburban St. Louis.

Griping about the farfetchedness of these circumstances seems picky. This isn’t the first time mismatched passengers have been thrust together on a road trip for an audience’s amusement; The Lucky Ones is Planes, Trains and Automobiles with dog tags. The problem isn’t the setup, but what comes next: a series of self-consciously “colourful” escapades and a barrage of limp wackiness. T.K. meets a trailer of call girls camping in the woods; Colee has a catfight in a bar; jilted by his wife, Cheever falls into a threesome (and runs out of the room, like Yosemite Sam with his britches on fire). All these cute little vignettes come to feel embarrassing, like someone showing up at a funeral in a pink tutu.

Cheever needs $20,000 to pay for his son’s Ivy League education. Colee’s guitar – once touched by Elvis – is worth $20,000, but she can’t sell it because it’s her bridge to the future: essentially homeless, she’s hoping to be taken in by her boyfriend’s family.

That’s the kind of highly romantic detail that abounds in a film with unflinching admiration for military men and women. But while respect is certainly due the troops in real life, on screen, the deification of the soldiers prevents any cracks or complexity; their unquestionable goodness is dramatic death.

Everywhere they go, what looks like good luck turns out to have been earned through their service in Iraq. When there are no more rental cars, a clerk notices the trio, and asks, “Are you army? I have one more car.” Again and again, given boosts by strangers, their “thank yous” are met with, “No, thank you.” We’re a long way from the anti-establishment takedown of Vietnam-era films like Coming Home.

While on leave, bright-eyed soldier Colee (Rachel McAdams) hopes to return her deceased soldier-boyfriend's guitar to his family. (Matt Dinerstein/Maple Pictures)

Maybe the warm welcome is reflective of a shift in America, a determination amongst civilians not to repeat the icy reception experienced by so many soldiers in that contested war. The result of all these good intentions is a film that’s determinedly apolitical; the closest anyone comes to debating the Iraq war is at an opulent lawn party – another tidy episode. There, the wonderful actor John Heard, cocktail in hand and voice notched up to drunken confidence, makes some noise about the mess “over there.” I really wanted to see how far he would go, and what a confrontation between these decent soldiers and a jerky critic might look like. But the scene is truncated (will it surface on DVD?), stripped bare to its most inoffensive self, just like the movie. How apolitical is it? Cheever has returned from Iraq because a porta-potty fell on him. Ha! A porta-potty! Why do I doubt that’s why most injured soldiers have been sent home?

The episodic structure gets just plain weird when out of nowhere, a high-tech special effects tornado hits. Huh? Maybe the film was meant to be awash in magic realism, or to possess the texture of a fable, or an O. Henry story with a guitar in place of combs. But The Lucky Ones is devoid of the kind of beauty or imagination that would make you suspend your disbelief.

The actors are above all this, so good that at times, the saccharine hug-a-lug message is genuinely moving. Pena does bravado very well, while McAdams’ ear-to-ear grin lends eternal optimism to her beaten-down character. Robbins’ troubled, dedicated father is a nice note for him; he seems very comfortable here, though it’s an oddly toothless turn for such an anti-war activist.

Whether the actors and filmmakers intended to or not, they’re speaking for a group that’s rarely heard form in this war, especially these days, when Iraq has become an abstraction batted around for electoral gains. Yet it’s very possible to come away from this cheerful, rainbow-hued fantasy with little sense of the soldiers’ experience in Iraq, or even their experience at home. Because the true plight of these new veterans remains an untold story, the manufactured sentiment of The Lucky Ones feels like a wasted opportunity.

The Lucky Ones opens Sept. 29.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.