Film review by Kevin Patterson
Full Metal Jacket (R, 1986) Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Kubrick, Michael Kerr, and Gustav Hasford. Starring Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey.
Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is a bit disconnected at times, but its investigation into the training and battle experience of American soldiers sent to Vietnam is so unrelentingly dark and intense that it still makes for a noteworthy "Vietnam movie." It begins as a group of Marine recruits report to training camp, where they are subjected to all manners of humiliation by a drill sergeant (Lee Ermey) who tells them, in ridiculous macho lectures that are funny to everyone except himself, that "Marines are not allowed to die without permission!" and that God likes Marines, "because we kill every man we see - it keeps heaven well-stocked!"
But Full Metal Jacket is hardly a retread of Kubrick's previous black-comic military satire, Dr. Strangelove; it soon takes on a very bleak, tragic tone as one recruit, Private "Gomer Pyle" (Vincent D'Onofrio) becomes the target of Ermey's most vicious abuse. Mentally and physically incompetent, Pyle fails at almost every test and constantly makes dumb mistakes. The sergeant decides that the other recruits will be punished every time Pyle flubs up, and soon comes the inevitable incident in which the other recruits awake in the middle of the night and beat the helpless Pyle with rolled-up socks. The training is dehumanizing at every turn; the sergeant, when not forcing his trainees to recite vulgar adolescent chants about Eskimo women and such, often announces proudly and repeatedly that these soldiers will soon be "in a world of shit" when they go to Vietnam and that his intention is to make them into killers.
After this story reaches a harrowing conclusion in which Pyle finally cracks, the film then follows another of the recruits, Private Joker (Matthew Modine), on his tour of duty in Vietnam as he works first as a military journalist and then joins a combat unit. The journalism segment is a little slow and not particularly enlightening at first. When Joker goes to cover some actual fighting and later joins up with a unit, however, the film's powerful and unsettling portrait of cruelty and corruption returns in full force. Most of the soldiers either seem to have sunk into unashamed disrespect for human life (one of them wonders what they will do when the war is over since they "won't have gooks to shoot" any more) or simply aren't intelligent enough to grasp the implications of what they are doing (another, when asked to comment on the war, says in all earnestness, "They don't even have horses in Vietnam. I mean, how f***ed up is that?").
Joker, by contrast, seems to be perceptive enough to realize what is happening to him and his colleagues, but he is mostly powerless to do anything about it. Instead, he is reduced to making cheap, cynical remarks, most of which fly over everyone else's head, such as when he states, "I came to Vietnam to interact with different people from an exotic culture, and kill them." And the battle scene at the end, in which Joker and some other Marines are forced to sit by helplessly as a sniper inflicts a slow and painful death by repeated shooting on two of their fellow soldiers, is one of the most tragic moments of cinema I have seen in recent memory. When they finally catch up with (and shoot) the sniper, they are confronted with the choice of letting the sniper die that same slow and painful death or administering a mercy killing; nowhere else in the film is the contrast between Joker's lingering humanity and the cold brutality of the other soldiers better portrayed.
Full Metal Jacket would have been perfectly effective, then, as an appropriately loosely structured "slice of life" from the Vietnam War, but unfortunately Kubrick doesn't choose to end it that way. Instead, he ends with a voiceover narration from Joker with some observations about violence and survival. It's as if, after two perfectly crafted hours of unrelentingly dark psychology, the film decided it had a "point" to make after all; this sudden change of direction is enough to bounce the film down from what would have been an A or even an A+ in my book to an A-. It seems unfair to downgrade it so much for one flawed minute of film, but when it's the last minute, it does make a difference. Other than that misstep, however, Full Metal Jacket is a remarkable piece of cinema that deserves a place with the other classic "Vietnam movies."
Grade: A-
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