G.I. Jane (1997) * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Irredeemably stupid and pigheaded attempt at a story about the first female Navy SEAL. Read ROGUE WARRIOR instead.
Demi Moore has never been terribly compelling, if you ask me, but she's the best thing in G.I. JANE, a dismal and off-kilter piece of work from the once-notable director Ridley Scott. What's to be said about a movie where the best scene is the one where she shaves her own head?
The biggest problems with G.I. JANE are a) plausibility and b) deployment. The broad outlines of the story are compelling -- the very concept of women in the military has always caused a stir in many quarters -- but the movie hasn't got the faintest idea how to put across its conceits. Plus, it suffers from a grafted-on Hollywood plot that one can hear squeaking and grinding blocks away.
Moore plays O'Neil, a career military woman with enough endurance for any three soldiers. She gets involved in a pilot program to allow women in the SEAL training program, which is being coordinated by a brassy female senator (Anne Bancroft, utterly wasted). A good example of the movie's basic airheadedness -- or maybe indecisiveness -- is an early scene with Moore's beau, also a military man. "I wasn't ready to decide the rest of my life today," he bleats at her while scrubbing her toes in the bathroom. The whole speech was glaringly upstaged by the fact that for a military office, O'Neil -- sorry, Demi -- has amazingly good-looking feet.
O'Neil's trouble begins before she even enters SEAL training proper. A whole bevy of preferential treatments have been set up to provide women with a slightly easier road into the military, and apparently all of those protocols have been preserved in the SEAL program as well. This gets O'Neil hopping mad, since that's the last thing she wants. There are several tongue-tied speeches about whether or not her very presence there "makes a statement", but the movie simply doesn't have the capacity to make us care; it's too busy hustling us through one manufactured conflict after another.
The details of the SEAL training are ridiculous and overblown. In Richard Marcienko's eye-opening book ROGUE WARRIOR, there are a great many details about the brutality of the program (60 percent of the enlistees don't make it). In G.I. JANE, we're treated to the unbelievable sight of the drill seargeants using live ammo on the recruits in one exercise. In another scene, the recruits have to eat their meals out of trash cans. Physical abuse is commonplace (another total boner). Even THE HILL didn't go this far.
As the movie plodded onwards, I kept asking myself: Isn't there some basis in fact for a better, more compelling story about this subject? A story that wasn't beholden to Hollywood conventions about the military, for one? The movie also shoots itself in the foot by injecting gratuitous pop-song snatches onto the soundtrack ("Mama Told Me Not To Come" is used to disastrous effect at one point), which only makes the movie seem that much more contrived and manipulative.
Demi is, interestingly enough, fine in the picture. There was never a moment when I doubted her competence or her physical presence. It was the rest of the movie I had my reservations about. Big ones.
syegul@cablehouse.dyn.ml.org
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