Hardball World

Rating: 6/10 (14 May 2008)

The great thing about Stanley Kubrick is that there is no mistaking a movie of his, however diverse they are from one another, as a movie by any other director.
The problem with his films, oftentimes, is the same thing. Case in point: "Full Metal Jacket".
"Full Metal Jacket" is the last movie Kubrick made that wasn't "Eyes Wide Shut", one big reason I think it has such a strong cheering section on this board. Yes, it's intense, singular, and full of great quotes. It's also threadbare plot-wise and structurally unbalanced, full of one-dimensional performances and an overabundance of Kubrick's trademark shots.
Pvt. Joker (Matthew Modine) is the central character, who we follow on his journey from Parris Island to Hue City, Vietnam, where during the Tet Offensive he becomes "born-again hard" and acquires the much-storied quality known as "the 1,000-yard stare."
I like this film, just not a lot. It's what I'd call a Kubrick problem picture much like his "Barry Lyndon", a good movie of entirely different character that carries much of the same pedantic weight. I can't really get into "Full Metal Jacket", neither Modine nor anyone else garners my sympathy or lasting interest, but its exciting and arresting in its refusal to play by the rules of a Vietnam war film. In "The Deer Hunter" or "Platoon", for example, the loss of innocence is a central theme. Here it's clear innocence was lost long before these guys arrived in 'Nam.
For many people, it's the first 45 minutes that make this film great, the boot camp section with the bullying drill instructor Hartmann (R. Lee Ermey) and his rounding on fragile conscript Pvt. Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), a.k.a. Gomer Pyle. "My orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps," Hartmann explains at the outset, but his treatment of Pyle suggests a darker motive.
"Full Metal Jacket" is a dark film all the way, and for me, the middle section is the part worth watching, in which we discover the war in Joker's eyes, in a series of short, pungent vignettes taken from Michael Herr's twisted and brilliant war memoir "Dispatches": "The dead have been covered with lime. The dead know only one thing - it is better to be alive."
Kubrick's camera ODs on carnage, emotional and physical, making us feel as deep in that world of excrement as poor Private Pyle. The unrelenting heaviness of tone brings one to the point where you expect a bigger payoff in the end than you actually get. Joker loses some comrades, gets his stare, and marches on to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club, a scene that strives for more irony than it actually delivers.
But Kubrick's movie is hard where it needs to be, aided much by the vicious comic stylings of Ermey, the subdued inventiveness of set designer Anton Furst (you try dressing England into a jungly war zone), and a terrific musical score of sardonically placed AM pop. It's a film worth having, but I think if Kubrick had bestowed his talent and vision on a couple of other projects in the last 20 years of his life, this movie wouldn't enjoy the somewhat bloated reputation it has today.