Putting On the Jacket

My incessant usage of FlickChart has amassed a lengthy list of movies I haven't seen. More than I'll ever want to see. But a useful thing about the "Movies I Haven't Seen" list is that it gets ordered by the global rank assigned to it by FlickChart users. In other words, it's probably a good ordered list of "What I Should See Next."

High on the list of movies I hadn't seen was Stanley Kubrick's 1987 war film, Full Metal Jacket. It's been in my Netflix queue for ages -- probably since I first had a Netflix queue. I decided to bump it to the top and see what I'd been missing.

When critic Roger Ebert originally reviewed the film, he gave it an average rating and an overall thumbs down, calling it "strangely shapeless." His colleague Gene Siskel apparently gave him a lot of grief for this opinion, bit I for one am in full agreement. Full Metal Jacket isn't a bad movie, and there are great moments in it. Just don't expect anything resembling a plot to ever show up. The film is just a long series of self-contained episodes ranging anywhere from one to ten minutes each, grouped into two sections: boot camp and Vietnam. Things happen, but no real story is told.

Undoubtedly, this lack of narrative is intentional in order to make several points that might include the following: Vietnam was a war that many people felt had no point to it; Marine training is a day in, day out, demoralizing slog that similarly feels like it has no beginning, middle, or end; war in general "just is." I do understand the stylistic choice. I just don't agree with it. A movie should tell a story and not only present images or episodes; the latter seems more the purview of poetry to me.

With that vaguely rant-like observation out of my system, let me turn to what is good about the film. There's a fine cast, including Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, Arliss Howard, Adam Baldwin, and John Terry. Each brings a distinct character to the soldier he plays, a particularly important thing for the boot camp grunts to capture.

But really, if you want to know the reason to watch this movie, it's R. Lee Ermey. His drill instructor Hartman is an iconic character in cinema, well-known even among people who've never seen the movie, and often imitated and parodied (on occasion, even by the actor himself). But there's a reason this actor is famous for this character -- he's that good. He's one of the few people ever allowed to improvise dialogue in a Stanley Kubrick film, and he allegedly improvised nearly all of it. Reports say that he also routinely needed only two or three takes to nail his scenes, even though Kubrick notoriously would do dozens -- even hundreds -- of takes in his filmmaking process. I don't know how better to explain it. He doesn't just become this character; it seems like he is this character.

For Ermey alone, I probably would recommend watching this movie... or at least the first half of it in which he appears. But personally, I find the aimless lack of narrative a fatal flaw in the film, and can only see my way to rating it a C- overall.