Film Review : FULL METAL JACKET * * * *

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

CAST Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Adam Baldwin, Arliss Howard, Vincent Donofrio

DIRECTOR Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", is a film which plays like two short films wrapped in one. The first, being the boot camp of trainees before they ship off to Vietnam, and the second, those trainees in Vietnam experiencing the war.

The first part introduces us to marine privates in boot camp. Matthew Modine is Joker, the main character of the movie. Arliss Howard plays Cowboy, his buddy, and Donofrio is Pyle, the platoon's mess up. Heading the platoon is Master Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, played in oscar calibur form by R. Lee Ermey. It is this first part of the film that grabs our full attention. Hartman is a hard nosed disciplinary who shapes the troops in to fighting men. He is tough and strict. There are scenes of energy throughout that make us love the troops. We deal with their struggle to make boot camp as if we knew them and were rooting for them. Private Pyle is the goof and he gets everyone in trouble repeatedly. One night the troops get fed up with Pyle, and they give him a good beating with bars of soap wrapped tightly in towels. This action causes Pyle to snap, resulting in a most powerful scene at the end of the first act.

Later on we cut to Vietnam and find Joker, as a combat correspondent, getting assigned to a platoon where his old buddy Cowboy is stationed. There we follow the two and other colorful characters through some of the best war time combat filming in the movies. The filming is splendid, as is it with all of master Kubrick's films.

The two main parts of the movie are like mini movies in themselves. Each could stand alone as its own personal film. Yet they are tied together by the fact that we are seeing a different state of evolution for the same group of characters. It is wonderful and frightening how we see the maturation of Joker. Modine is convincing in his role and shows a level of maturity here that we see in some of his later films, like Short Cuts. The ending is haunting and typical of the nightmares of war, asking the age old question, What was this war really all for?