Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket follows several Vietnam-era soldiers as they’re trained and sent into battle, with the movie specifically detailing the exploits of Matthew Modine’s Joker, Arliss Howard’s Cowboy, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Gomer Pyle. And while the narrative eventually details the recruits’ experiences during the war, director Stanley Kubrick offers up a first half devoted to the aforementioned characters’ punishing treatment at the hands of R. Lee Ermey’s hard-nosed drill sergeant – with the decidedly engrossing nature of this stretch heightened by Ermey’s thoroughly captivating performance. The spellbinding opening 45 minutes, which concludes with an astonishingly riveting climax, ensures that the film loses some momentum in its midsection, as Kubrick abruptly shifts the focus to the troops’ initial arrival in Vietnam and their subsequent efforts at finding their footing there. There’s little doubt, then, that the comparatively traditional second act comes off as palpably erratic, with Kubrick offering up an almost equal mix of engaging and padded-out sequences – although, to be fair, it’s impossible to deny that when Full Metal Jacket is cooking, it’s really cooking. The film improves substantially as it charges into its impressively tense final stretch, with the movie’s closing minutes packing an emotional power that one might not have necessarily expected – which, in the end, cements Full Metal Jacket‘s place as a justifiably iconic war film.

***1/2 out of ****