A Few Good Men

Based on a play by Aaron Sorkin, A Few Good Men follows green military lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) as he’s assigned to defend a pair of Marines (Wolfgang Bodison’s Harold Dawson and James Marshall’s Louden Downey) accused of murdering a fellow soldier – with the case eventually leading Kaffee directly to a feared colonel named Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson). Director Rob Reiner does an impressively solid job of initially (and instantly) drawing the viewer into the far-from-brisk proceedings, as the movie’s engrossing setup is heightened by a series of compelling and charismatic performances – with, of course, Cruise’s absolutely magnetic turn as the cocky protagonist remaining a consistent highlight. (It’s clear, too, that Nicholson’s justifiably-iconic performance hasn’t lost a whiff of its impact in the years since the film’s 1992 release.) The problem, however, lies with A Few Good Men‘s palpably padded-out and overlong running time of 138 minutes, as much of the midsection is devoted to sequence after sequence of Kaffee and his team (Demi Moore’s JoAnne Galloway and Kevin Pollak’s Sam Weinberg) investigating and strategizing. Some of this stuff is undoubtedly quite interesting but a great deal of it is redundant and repetitive, and it’s ultimately difficult not to wish that Reiner and editors Robert Leighton and Steven Nevius had streamlined the narrative to a fairly considerable degree. Such concerns are rendered moot, however, in the face of an absolutely spellbinding final stretch, with the climactic (and now-infamous) confrontation between Kaffee and Jessup ensuring that the film closes on as engrossing a note as one could envision – which confirms the movie’s place as a solid legal thriller that benefits substantially from a raft of better-than-average elements.

*** out of ****