One of Kubrick's Best.

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2001)

There are a lot of war movies these days, and they are all very powerful, but some of them (like Thin Red Line) don't live up to a truly powerful war movie. Let's go back 14 years, shall we? What were war movies back then? See Full Metal Jacket to find out. Full Metal Jacket was seriously one of Stanley Kubrick's best films, but not his best, though. It shows the people that fought and the people that trained to fight.
Full Metal Jacket was about the people who fought for a Vietnamese war, the war that was never completed. Thus, the film makes you want more. The first half of the movie takes us to people that were trained for the Vietnamese war in 1968, then the second our hero (Mathew Modine) goes to Vietnam to fight and take pictures. All of this sounds ridiculous but Stanley Kubrick gives us a realistic feel that we only see in the newer war movies.
The acting was awesome, but what I loved the most was Kubrick's direction. It seemed....different. As if this movie was made to be an action movie, but not a Kubrick movie. Full Metal Jacket was Kubrick's second final film before he died, and it will leave a mark, too.
There are some scenes I would delete, though, like when a Vietnamese whore comes and charges a man 5 bucks to have sex with him. There is no sex scenes thank God, but that part in the movie proved that Stanley Kubrick wrote it. Or another where the soldiers compare their "rifle" to their "guns", if you know what I mean. Please don't worry! There is also no nudity, but these scenes where really stupid and didn't quite maintain the "war movie" feel.
Mathew Modine is a great actor, but I'm even more surprised that Vincent D'Onofrio is in the movie. He plays a slow-minded overweight man who gets picked on by everyone in the first half of the movie. Vincent is also a terrific answer, and what he does to himself is not "war movie"-like, but it is so powerful and disturbing that I have to say that Full Metal Jacket is one of the most intense movies I have seen in a long time.
With all the intensity and the war scenes, Full Metal Jacket goes on my top 5 of "best war movies". See it for yourself, is you are a hardcore Stanley Kubrick fan (like me), or even if you aren't! My dad hates him, but loves the movie. I give my full recomendations on Full Metal Jacket.
8/10 (-2 for the sex references)