Kubrick out of Ammo with Full Metal Jacket

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2007)

By the time Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket it was evident the once enormously talented director had lost a step or two. Barry Lyndon was a beautiful bore to endure and his adaption of Stephen King's The Shining was drained of terror. Full Metal continued the slide but did not end it. The worst was yet to come with Eyes Wide Shut.
Jacket is Kubrick's late entry to a long line of Viet Nam films that followed the unpopular war. The first half takes place on Paris Island where Marine recruits are put through basic training. It is a brutal and suspenseful first half made all the more powerful by Lee Ermey's intense DI. Once overseas the film founders badly. Kubrick keeps his camera moving with elaborate pans and tracking shots but his actors become lifeless caricatures and psychos, a rich pastiche of ugly Americans and moronic commanders. In Strangelove there was a dark comic touch that made it work. Here it only shows an out of touch artist trying to be relevant and hip with a paler Apocalypse Now take that was done (and done a lot better) eight years earlier.
The last half hour really exacerbates matters with a scene that concerns routing a sniper. To maintain suspense this long is impossible in such a situation and it is proved here. There is also a contrived denouement to the whole scene that rings hollow.
Put another director's moniker on it and the crit's would give it passable grades as an anti-war film with a touch too much self indulgence and sluggish editing. But since it's Stanley's watch what you say. Well since it is Stanley's I give Metal a five instead of a six since the great cutting edge director of classic original film work as Dr.Strangelove, 2001, A Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange followed this time instead of taking the lead as he has done in the past. In this case with a less than impressive effort that borrows heavily from some of his past works.