Purple Hearts definitely won't win any medals
Overstuffed with songs by Sofia Carson, this bloated dramedy about a musician and a military man offers little originality and even less chemistry
Take the unquestioning military-worship and broad counterculture misrepresentations of a standard faith-based movie, remove the Jesus references, and substitute mild fuzz-guitar pop for country music and you get Purple Hearts, a wounded-warrior movie aimed primarily at Disney kids who’ve grown up on Descendants star and singer Sofia Carson. If none of that means much to you now, it won’t once you watch it, either.
Carson, who plays Cassie, performs numerous songs in the film, some of them cover tunes and others originals written by Justin Tranter (who has penned hits for Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato). As an example of the former, she gives an electric zhush to standards like “Sweet Caroline” with a baby-talk, Betty Boop voice that makes Gwen Stefani sound like Marianne Faithfull. As Cassie begins to write her own songs, they become somewhat more vocally soulful, but no less plot-stalling in a Netflix movie that’s way too long at two hours and two minutes. The premise—sassy feminist singer/bar server Cassie and whitebread delinquent-turned-Marine Luke (Nicholas Galitzine) marry for the money and health benefits just before he ships out to Iraq—deserves 90 minutes, at most, to explore, presuming you believe this concept deserves the time of day at all.
Considering the film looks like it was shot at Camp Pendleton—depicting basic training like it’s a fun P.E. class instead of the usual drill sergeant cliches—it’s obvious that there are no circumstances in which these protagonists will get away with defrauding the military. Nor will liberal Cassie and conservative Luke ever so much as criticize the premise of U.S. troops in Iraq, a military operation the film unambiguously frames as somehow protecting American lives. Instead, the characters deliver lines like, “What exactly would you like us to do—go over there and teach them pronouns?” or “So what does the tattoo say, ‘Socialism Now’?”
Cassie begins the movie rightfully putting such people in their place, especially Armando (Nicholas Duvernay), the platoon’s primary bigot/misogynist who longs to kill “A-rabs” and uses pickup lines like “We’re good enough to fight for your ass, but not enough to touch it?” But because Cassie is diabetic and unable to afford her insulin—and Luke owes money to some bad people—the two agree to a sham marriage, despite the fact that they otherwise loathe each other.