excellent start but falls flat in second half

Rating: 6/10 (18 June 2014)

I have been rewatching war films lately and just finished with Full Metal Jacket about the Vietnam war era. The story covers the lives of several recruits from boot camp thru to battle in Vietnam.
The best part is the first half of the movie at boot camp. The drill sergeant, played by Lee Ermey, blows you away with an unbelievably vivid depiction of the cruelty handed out by drill sergeants to new recruits. This part of the movie moves along nicely, showing you day after day how the training wears down the recruits into a single unit. However, one recruit Gomer Pyle, played by a young Vincent D'onofrio from TV's Law and Order, has a screw loose. And the screw gets looser and looser until the final scene of boot camp that literally blows you away.
Then, poof, the bottom falls out of the movie, as Joker (played OK by Modine) gets assigned to be a journalist in Vietnam. He displays a sly wit while he has Born to Kill on his helmet, but wears a peace badge. He's supposed to be cynically sarcastic about the role of the marines in Vietnam, but I felt his acting left something to be desired.
In Vietnam, he meets up with his buddy Cowboy, and they reminisce about things. Joker wants to see some action, so he joins the squad as they march thru this city. Bombs happen, shootings happen, snipers happen. But the action is not well-linked. I did not feel pulled into the action to feel the tension, not like from other better war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Born on the 4th of July, or especially Platoon.
In the final scene, with the Joker coming to grips with what war really does and what it can bring out in an otherwise normal human being, again, it fails to excite, and falls flat, just like the ending. Man, see Charlie Sheen in Platoon if you want to see the benchmark that Full Metal Jacket fails to reach.
I will soon rewatch Platoon, and possibly Apocalypse Now. But I don't strongly recommend Full Metal Jacket because after the boot camp, it fails poorly. Based on the great boot camp filmography alone, I give it a 6/10 overall. Good luck.