Pyle. Pyle! PYLE!

Rating: 6/10 (4 November 2017)

"Full Metal Jacket" is an American live action film from 1987, so this one has its 30th anniversary this year. It runs for minimally under 2 hours and it is of course one of the most known works by legendary director Stanley Kubrick and the fact that this one is in the IMDb Top250 certainly works in his favor here. It is also the film that brought him his final Oscar nomination as he was part of the team that adapted the novel this is based on. Anyway, there is a pretty clean structure in here. The first 50 minutes or so are about the training for the armed forces and we see a handful of recruits, most of them relatively young still, and how they want to become American soldiers. Problem is they have a really tough gunnery sergeant in charge of them. The latter is played by R. Lee Ermey and this film brought him the biggest success of his career, a Golden Globe nomination and that's quite something, even if he came short at the Oscars. I guess he won't be too mad about it. The second half then is in fact scenes from the battlefield. And as I am not too much of a film of (anti-)war movies in general, these did not do as much for me as the psychological thriller (you probably can call it that) in the hour before that. This does not necessarily have a lot to do with it being bad or anything, on the contrary there are some good scenes there like the one with the prostitute, but with my personal preference because I find stuff like Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan equally underwhelming. I liked this one here probably even more because of the insight into group dynamics and relationships between the characters, even if this area also was one of my biggest problems. Sure it isn't an actors movie and that's fine, but most of the characters and actors seem so interchangeable here sadly.
The one exception to that is Vincent D'Onofrio. I may be biased here too because I like him a lot as well, but I don't think many could have pulled it off as good as he did here and the fact that he is of course missing completely from the second half of the film is not helping at all. Anyway I am glad he starred in here because it was the breakthrough for a long and prolific career on the small and big screen and hopefully a lot more will be coming too. Perhaps the R. Lee Ermey fans will agree that the film got worse in the second half as there must be a reason behind his awards recognition, not only at the Globes. I am sure his actual military background definitely helped him with his success story. As for D'Onofrio, his last scene was definitely the highlight of the film and boy did he look scary there. Okay, about the film what else can you say. I personally think it hardly had any moments when it was really weak, but the greatness early on vanishes eventually, so yeah unless you love military films, I suggest you turn it off perhaps at the big breaking point I mentioned already. It's not IMDb top250 worthy in my opinion, but as a whole it is still a fairly decent watch. I give it a thumbs-up.