Thank You for Your Service (2017 film)

After a harrowing 15-month combat tour in Iraq, the much-decorated Adam Schumann returns home to Kansas and a loving wife, Saskia. Adam and Saskia have two young children, a daughter and an infant son born while Adam was still overseas. Adam has PTSD as manifested by nightmares and frequent flashbacks for which his wife convinces him to seek help from an overburdened Department of Veterans Affairs. He also receives solace from two Iraq buddies living nearby, an American Samoan, Solo Aieti, and Billy Waller, who commits suicide in front of his fiancée after discovering she has taken all of his money and their child and left him. Adam's unresolved psychological issues revolve around his failure to safely rescue a fellow soldier from a building under fire (Michael Emory, who was dropped on his head and rendered hemiplegic but later expresses gratitude to Adam for being alive) and survivor's guilt about letting Sergeant First Class James Doster take Adam's place on patrol one day. With Doster filling in for Adam, the Humvee made a wrong turn and hit an improvised explosive device. Solo assisted the men in their escape to safety, but Doster was inadvertently left behind and died in the conflagration. Doster's grieving widow, Amanda, who is friends with Saskia Schumann, finally gains closure as she learns the circumstances of her husband's death towards the end of the movie and absolves Adam and Solo of responsibility for it. Meanwhile, Solo has such severe PTSD and memory loss that he is unable to fulfill a fervent desire to reenlist for another tour in Iraq. He falls in with a group of drug dealers led by a Gulf War veteran, Dante. Adam rescues his friend and puts him on a Greyhound bus to California, where Solo will take Adam's reserved place at a rehabilitation center specializing in the treatment of PTSD. Sometime later, Adam returns from his own stay at the rehabilitation center, being greeted by his wife and children back in their original home. ==Cast==

On March 12, 2013, DreamWorks announced that it had acquired the film rights to David Finkel's then-upcoming non-fiction book Thank You for Your Service, about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers who return from the war in Iraq and have difficulties in adapting to civilian life. Steven Spielberg was expected to direct the film, On June 30, 2015, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Hall would instead be making his directorial debut with the film from his own script. Jon Kilik produced the film, which Universal Pictures distributes in the United States. On January 7, 2016, Scott Haze was added to play a soldier suffering from PTSD. On January 28, 2016, Joe Cole joined the film to play a soldier who returns home in crisis and tries to find his fiancée and their daughter who have left him, while Jayson Warner Smith joined the film to play a receptionist at a Veterans Affairs office. On February 9, 2016, Amy Schumer joined the cast with three others, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Brad Beyer, and Omar Dorsey. It was later revealed that Kate Lyn Sheil had also joined the cast. Filming Principal photography on the film began on February 9, 2016, in Atlanta, Georgia. In March 2016, it filmed at the Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth, Georgia. ==Release==

The film had its world premiere at the Heartland Film Festival on October 15, 2017, and was theatrically released in the United States on October 27, 2017. The film was later made available for community-organized screenings through Gathr’s event-based booking service. Home media Thank You for Your Service was released on Digital on January 9, 2018, and on Blu-ray and DVD on January 23, 2018, By Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. Promotion On October 20, 2017, Universal and DreamWorks announced a partnership with AMC Theatres to give more than 10,000 free tickets to the film to veterans and service members. ==Reception==

Box office In the United States and Canada, Thank You for Your Service was released alongside Jigsaw and Suburbicon, and was projected to gross around $5 million from 2,054 theaters in its opening weekend. It ended up debuting to $3.7 million, finishing 6th at the box office, and marking the second straight week Teller was featured in a well-received but underperforming biopic, following Only the Brave. In its second weekend it grossed $2.3 million, dropping 40%, and finishing 7th at the box office. Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 77% based on 113 reviews, with an average rating of 6.69/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Thank You for Your Service takes a sobering and powerfully acted – if necessarily incomplete – look at soldiers grappling with the horrific emotional impact of war." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film 3.5/4 stars, stating that, although a studio picture: ==References==