First half is a great film in itself

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 1999)

It's like a broken record now but I do agree the first half of FMJ was some of the most gripping movie footage I've ever seen. I would almost say that it is a companion piece to the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan-it showed the intense mental violence that is perpetrated on G.I.s before they ever hit foreign soil. Lee Ermey created one of THE great screen characters in movie history.
The rest of the movie is thoughtful and more subtle than anything in Platoon and the other more famous 80's war movies but it's still kind of tepid and too conventional to mesh with the boot camp sequence, which is electric and unflinchingly real. I still rank this movie as probably my favorite war film but have to admit it's uneven.