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Poster (c) Warner Brothers
Full Metal Jacket is the fourth Stanley Kubrick movie I have seen (the others are 2001, The Shining, and Dr. Strangelove). This is my second favorite out of those four.
It’s basically a two-part story. The first part is clearly the better part, and is one of the best acts in a movie I have ever seen. It has a drill instructor (R. Lee Ermey) sadistically dehumanizing recruits into the Marines for the Vietnam War. This is one of the basics of Kubrick movies, the dehumanization of humans. It is most clearly seen in The Shining, also. Among some of the new Marines are Joker (Matthew Modine), Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio), and Cowboy (Arliss Howard). Gomer is fat, so the drill instructor likes to pick on him. The second part has them actually going into the war.
It’s really hard to put the first part into words. Ermey spitfires insults and hateful things for about ten minutes straight, without taking a breath or anything. He was a drill instructor before becoming an actor, and it shows. He was outstanding, just truly outstanding. He was screwed from winning Best Supporting Actor for his role. Just like the narration of Fight Club, it’s hard to put how I feel into words.
Something I didn’t expect was that it had bits and pieces of humor that were in it. Most of it, yet again, came from Ermey as he was yelling at the recruits. I laughed a lot, even though they weren’t that appropriate. The laughs, obviously, tapered off in the second part. Much of the humor wasn’t P.C., either, but this was 15 years ago.Only a genius could put humor into a time of turmoil. Thank you, Mr. Kubrick.
Overall, I have two complaints about the films. First, the editing was poor. Second, the second act could obviously not compare to the first one. Although the second part was good, maybe a 7/10, the first part was over a 10/10, so I took around an average. The second part, however, was very realistic and made me feel like I was in the Vietnam War.
Ermey was terrific, as I said before, but Modine proved himself to be a good leading actor. Although he hasn’t done much recently, he could come back as a good actor. I really liked the music in Full Metal Jacket, sometimes it was cheerful, especially in the beginning, when the recruits were getting their heads shaved. The narration was rather odd, coming and going.
The violence isn’t gratuitous, but there is a lot of it. It looked realistic, which is good. It’s better to have realistic violence and blood than fake. Instead of sugarcoating the violence to a PG-13 level, they showed everything, graphic but not over the top. Unfortunately, all of the deaths were in slow motion, but that didn’t stop me from looking at it and gasping in awe. Kubrick makes another bravura masterpiece here.
Rated R for strong language and violence, and sexual refrences.
Review Date: May 7, 2003