Criminally Overrated: Full Metal Jacket

In this feature our writers take down films they feel are wildly overpraised.

Anytime a list is drawn up by the cinema powers that be, something along the lines of “greatest war movies” or “seminal depictions of the Vietnam War in cinema,” it invariably includes Full Metal Jacket. That automatic veneration is baffling, as if the strength of director Stanley Kubrick’s reputation alone is enough, because it should rank among his worst efforts. Instead of a realistic portrait of solders coming to terms with the horrors of war, we are given superficial caricatures and a disjointed plot that doesn’t even hint at the essential truth of anything other than being in love with its highly stylized self.

Its not that Full Metal Jacket is totally bereft of redeeming characteristics; bad movie or not, Kubrick was a genius. The film’s cinematography alone makes it worth the price of admission. Kubrick could have filmed an office of IRS agents at work for the day and, as boring as that sounds, it would have at least been visually compelling. His attention to the geometry of scene, the color palette and the languid shots that frame those scenes almost makes sitting through the horrid plot worth it. Almost.

What we are left with, setting Kubrick’s visual mastery aside, is a movie that fails in virtually every other aspect. The first act of the movie, the memorable basic training set piece, is inarguably brilliant. The dance between Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Gny. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) is one of the greatest pieces of unintentional comedy committed to film. Rightfully so, that part of the film looms largest in everyone’s memory. It’s also the film’s first major flaw, indicative of the zeal with which Kubrick destroyed the narrative flow of the work and prevented any of the characters from developing in a meaningful way. We spend the first 45 minutes of the movie, unexpected funnies aside, becoming invested in two characters and two alone: the mentally unstable Pvt. Pyle and the demonic Hartman, only to see them both meet their untimely end. That leaves us players that have barely been developed for the final hour and fifteen minutes. After Pvt. Pyle offs himself we are hurled forward in time to Vietnam, without any sense of whether the basic training montage had any point other than bestowing us with a lifetime supply of ready-made catchphrases (it didn’t). The final two thirds of the movie follow Pvt. Joker, played with borderline comatose understatement by Matthew Modine, through increasingly harrowing combat situations in Vietnam that have no discernable connection to the first act other than the fact that Pvt. Joker bore witness to Pyle’s brain splattering suicide.

Every time the movie starts to gain momentum, it is shattered by useless scenes that do nothing to drive the storyline along. As soon we discover some surface-level truths about Joker (he’s a journalist, wears a peace sign on his uniform and is a “funny” guy), he’s off haggling with a Vietnamese hooker, needling his boss with thinly veiled, smarmy jokes or otherwise engaging in digressions that don’t especially enhance our understanding of the character. Joker should be the emotional base of the final act of the movie but instead he ends up as a facsimile of what an idealistic soldier lost in Vietnam might have been. It is as if Kubrick didn’t know what to do with Modine’s character after basic training. We never get to know Joker beyond his surface level sketch.

Even once he reunites with his basic training companion Pvt. Cowboy (Arliss Howard) on the front lines, Kubrick drops anvils through the plot that kill the momentum of the movie. Yet another hooker scene, this time the entire platoon haggling with her and her pimp, reinforces cheap racial stereotypes and paints the Vietnamese as somehow looking to capitalize on the presence of the Americans in a bizarre way. Further on, a documentary camera crew shows up, entirely without context, to interview the soldiers in Pvt. Cowboy’s platoon, accomplishing nothing besides destroying any semblance of narrative energy that was regained during the escalating combat scenes. It comes off as a sort of expository panic move on Kubrick’s part, as if he realized that he was falling short of moving beyond military movie clichés, substituting meta-interviews in the place of real development. The bizarre interviews conducted by the mystery crew only reinforce those stereotypes. We have the savage, dead-eyed Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), the jovial Texan Pvt. Cowboy, the token “soul brother” Pvt. Eightball (Dorian Harewood), all holding court for the documentarians and each giving us no more than what their predetermined roles deem they should.

The shallow ethic of the movie’s character development is played to its logical end when Pvt. Joker, having just witnessed Pvt. Cowboy’s evisceration at the hands on a Vietcong sniper, shrugs his shoulders and goes along when Animal Mother (rank unknown) deadpans, “Let’s go get some payback.” The Vietnam War produced thousands of “best friend died in my arms” type of stories and never has one been depicted on film that was so bereft of emotion. It’s almost an accomplishment to depict that kind of scene, which should be so heavy, and have it flatline so badly.

It was thoroughly cynical on Kubrick’s part to think that he could get away with depicting all of the parties involved in the war as dead-eyed killers, cartoonish marine lifers or vapid opportunists and positioning it as a realistic portrait of what took place in Vietnam. The even more unforgivable sin is that such and admittedly talented auteur of Kubrick’s ilk subjected these characters to such a disjointed and unfocused plot.

by Tom Volk

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